Halfway throughKing Lear, storm clouds gather, and Shakespeare’s protagonist rages, “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, / As full of grief as age; wretched in both.” And so, the mental unraveling of one of literature’s greatest characters begins. That Lear starts to lose his mind in this moment, in Act II, is important: If he were mad from the jump, the cause of his eventual downfall would be medical, not moral, and the king would bear no responsibility for the catastrophe that greets his kingdom. Precisely because the aging ruler is of sound mind in Act I, during which he sets into motion the events that threaten his sanity and his life, the blame is his to bear in Act V, when he has lost both.
Last year, the United States went through a presidential election filled with Shakespearean echoes. As Joe Biden tottered and fell (literally as well as metaphorically), more than a few punditscompared him to Lear, a man who was ruined by age, pride, and the flattery of sycophants. That analogy is picked up by Original Sin, the latest and most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline, which was written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson and draws on hundreds of interviews. It features an epigraph from Lear, and its first chapter gives airing to the view that, like Lear, Biden bears responsibility for his country’s fate. Quoting a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the title of that chapter is simply: “He Totally Fucked Us.”
Tapper and Thompson’s exposé joins a growing list of post-election appraisals blaming Biden for Harris’s loss. (I wrote one of these myself.) Yet the curious thing about the experience of reading Original Sin is that one comes away unable to lay the blame, or the majority of it anyway, at the feet of Scranton Joe. Here, the Lear analogy falls apart.
Original Sin suggests that, unlike Lear, who begins his rule flawed but with his mind intact, Biden may have been losing his grip before he took his oath of office. If this is true, Americans unwittingly voted for and were then led by a president who was not up to the job, a state of affairs that certain among the Biden faithful seemed committed to concealing. Tapper and Thompson studiously avoid saying this outright; to their credit, they do little editorializing. The book is written not unlike an autopsy report, describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail. The American people, however, must confront the possibility that the book raises: that we may not have had a president capable of discharging the office since Barack Obama left the White House, in 2017.
One might debate whether the former president can be held fully responsible for his disastrous reelection bid given his seemingly shaky mental acuity (which he continues to deny, saying that reports of his decline in office are “wrong”; Original Sin does not include his responses to any of the book’s allegations). Biden’s claims that he would have won a rematch with Donald Trump—which he reiterated in an appearance on The View last week—suggest that he is not fully tethered to political reality. But Original Sin leaves little doubt that his enablers, at least, understood what they were doing. (Former first lady Jill Biden denies this as well. She said on The View that her husband was a “a great president”; though she did not mention Original Sin by name, she said, “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.”)
In an author’s note, Tapper and Thompson offer a forewarning: “Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here.” But rejecting the most extreme claims made about Biden’s acuity hardly puts to rest the question of whether he should have run in 2020. And the idea that Biden was fully capable of doing the job when he first took office is quite hard to square with the 300-odd pages of meticulous reporting that follow.
It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”
Three years later, on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s struggles became more obvious to those around him. Tapper and Thompson report that, in 2020, members of Biden’s inner circle gave the candidate a teleprompter with scripted questions for a local-news interview. It was an apparent effort to work around his dwindling communicative and cognitive abilities: Aides lamented that even then, “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.” The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:
Biden would sit in a room with several monitors beaming the face of real Americans in front of him so that they could discuss issues of importance.
The videos came back, hours of footage. Some on the team couldn’t believe their eyes.
“The videos were horrible,” one top Democrat said. “He couldn’t follow the conversation at all.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” said a second Democrat, who hadn’t seen Biden in a few years. “It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”
A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes worth. They had to get creative.
The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)
The idea that this same man, only a short time later, was able to reliably prosecute the duties of the position to which he was elected is hard to believe. Indeed, some incidents cataloged in Original Sin suggest that Biden may have been struggling to do the job even early in his term. Cabinet meetings were “terrible and at times uncomfortable,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors. “And they were from the beginning.” Biden relied on note cards and canned responses. (Some Biden aides told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings are stilted in every administration, and that Biden was more engaged in smaller meetings.)
In his term’s first year, the authors write in the book, the president met with the House Democratic Caucus, ostensibly to ask its members to vote for a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. But after delivering prolix remarks that one congressperson characterized as “incomprehensible,” Biden did not make the ask—which many of the politicians present thought was a strategic decision. Later that month, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked him to address the caucus once more, hoping that this time he would push for the package. Yet again, Biden dithered and prattled. And yet again, a Democratic congressperson told Tapper and Thompson, Biden’s address was “meandering and incoherent.” Biden did finish with a strong demand: “That’s all I gotta say … let’s get this done.” The only problem? The assembled politicians weren’t sure what exactly the president wanted done because he had, once more, neglected to ask them to do anything. According to Tapper and Thompson, Pelosi believed that this was another strategic omission on Biden’s part. A different member of the Democratic leadership told Tapper and Thompson that it might have been a memory lapse: “We wondered: Did he forget to make the ask, or is this just him being a super-safe politician? Between his stutter and aging, we were never quite clear on what, exactly, was going on.” The next year, he did seem to have trouble with his memory; in 2022, according to one witness, Biden found himself unable to remember the name of his own national security adviser, Jake Sullivan—“Steve,” he called him at least twice—or his communications director, Kate Bedingfield, whom he once resorted to calling “Press.”
Biden’s limitations were also clear during a rambling interview with Special Counsel Hur in October 2023. It took place during the two days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which means that when Biden was ostensibly in charge of directing American foreign policy during a moment of profound geopolitical tension, the president was incapable of sitting through an interview without forgetting words and dates and going on rambling tangents. Rather than reacting with alarm to this fact, the White House mounted a pressure campaign against Attorney General Merrick Garland. As first reported by Politico, Biden insiders were furious that Garland hadn’t edited Hur’s observations about the president’s shoddy memory out of the classified-documents report, and most of Biden’s senior advisers reportedly believed that Garland would not continue in his role as AG during the president’s hypothetical second term.
One Biden campaign consultant referred to in the book, who was conducting focus groups around this time, found that voters were concerned that Biden’s apparent decline would put the country at risk: “Many of them were worried,” Tapper and Thompson write. “What if an international crisis unfolded in the middle of the night?” These voters were not the only ones having these morbid thoughts. “The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00am during an emergency,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”
As some high-ranking Democrats quoted anonymously in the book put it to Tapper and Thompson after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump last June: “Just who the hell is running the country?” At least one unnamed source close to the Biden administration was willing to provide the authors with an answer. “Five people were running the country,” this insider said, seemingly referring to the president’s closest advisers. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
Near the end of their book, Tapper and Thompson offer a glimpse into how powerful Democrats responded to the grim spectacle of Biden’s early-summer face-off with Trump. The authors describe a scene at the home of James Costos, an ambassador to Spain under Obama, where celebrities and politicians gathered to watch the debate. As a doddering Biden tanked onstage in front of some 50 million Americans, the film director and Democratic donor Rob Reiner became scared, then furious. “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy because of you!” he screamed, seeming to direct his ire at the closest thing to a Biden official in the room: Second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
What Reiner apparently failed to consider, but what Original Sin prompts readers to ask, is whether America’s democracy was already meaningfully diminished. Describing how some in Biden world justified propping him up for reelection in 2024, a longtime aide told Tapper and Thompson: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.” In other words, before Biden stepped down from the race, the plan for some aides seemed to be to Weekend at Bernie’s a cognitively impaired president in the hopes that, upon winning a second term, he could be hidden from the public while unelected staff took care of the real business of governing. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too,” this aide offered as a way of justifying what was, by any reasonable metric, an effort to undermine democracy and defraud the American people.
The members of Biden’s staff weren’t the only ones comfortable with abandoning democratic norms. The former president enjoyed the support of the Democratic Party, which at his behest blew up the old primary schedule, putting South Carolina in the first slot. The ostensible justification was anti-racism and elevating voters of color in a heavily Black state. According to Tapper and Thompson, aides at both the White House and the Democratic National Committee admitted that “the main motivation was helping Joe Biden, not uplifting Black voters.” South Carolina was a strong state for Biden, and the thinking seemed to be that a steady performance there might put primary challengers to bed early. In other words, the DNC appeared to try its level best to tip the process in favor of reelecting a man who a majority of the public thought could not do the job.
“Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,” asks Kent in King Lear, “When power to flattery bows?” The nobleman is one of the only characters in Shakespeare’s play who gives the king honest advice, and who warns Lear that the course of action he has chosen is dictated by pride, the result of following those who tell him what he wants—not needs—to hear.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Original Sin is how few Kents populate its pages. Dozens of people in Biden’s orbit suspected that he was not physically or mentally equipped to be the president of the United States, yet they helped him seek that office and keep it when he couldn’t reliably perform its duties. These people then sought to return Biden to that office for four more years, even if that meant the country would most likely have been quietly run by unelected aides. In a rational world, Congress would hold bipartisan hearings about how this happened and whether and to what extent Biden’s aides hid the truth from the public. Then again, in a rational world, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump—who has spent his first months back in office intentionally dismantling core institutions, flouting the law, and threatening the Constitution—would have been elected president in the first place.
There’s a low-stakes thrill in eavesdropping on strangers from afar, especially if the exchange descends into chaos. Yet a sketch in last night’s season finale of Saturday Night Live—which revolved around two couples at a bar boisterously fighting for a preferred table as two men watched nearby, whiskies in hand—raised the stakes of voyeurism in fascinating ways.
The sketch begins with Ego Nwodim and Marcello Hernández’s characters having glasses of wine at a bar; she is ready to move in after three weeks of dating, and he is sweatily trying to steer the conversation elsewhere. He gets a break when another woman, played by this week’s host, Scarlett Johanssen, insists that their table belongs to her and her man—played by musical guest Bad Bunny. After Nwodim urges Hernández to defend her honor, he gets in Bad Bunny’s face—shouts, “Ay!”—and they erupt in loud Spanish. But here’s what he really says: “I’m sorry, but my woman is a pain in my ass!” Picking up on the stray mention of “culo,” Nwodim jumps in: “That’s right, he’s about to beat your ass!”
The table argument is a flimsy premise, but it establishes Johanssen’s character as territorial and, crucially, inspiring terror in her paramour. Instead of demanding the table, Bad Bunny commiserates with Hernández: “Well mine too—and I’m afraid of her!” He looks back at Johanssen nervously, then confesses: “I know we’re not supposed to say that women are crazy. But this one? She’s crazy!” Hearing him say “loca,” Johanssen chirps up: “Do you hear that? He’s gonna go loca on you!” Meanwhile, the eavesdropping barflies (played by Andrew Dismukes and James Austin Johnson) look on with glee at what looks like a raging bar fight: “I feel like I’m watching a telenovela,” Johnson says, scratching his chin and practically licking his chops. Dismukes hopes it’ll end in a “slap and kiss”: “See in their culture, the line between passion and violence is paper thin.”
Johanssen’s botched attempts at Spanish (“I’m about to asparagus nothing more and your ankle!”) make for good comedy, but the sketch’s best work isn’t done by the peeved girlfriends or the barflies’ misbegotten commentary. Instead, it lies in the gap between what these non-Spanish speakers are confidently reading into the situation, casting these men as macho Latino guys in some exotic melodrama, and what the men are actually saying. They’re not only misunderstanding the words; they’re missing the subtext. And so might some viewers.
For these onlookers, the boyfriends are assuming archetypal roles that are completely at odds with how they actually feel, and their conversation deepens into a heart-to-heart between two strangers who don’t know how to quit a relationship they know is bad for them. As the argument grows more heated between Nwodim and Johanssen, Bad Bunny reassures her: “Baby baby baby, you’re talking about asparagus. Let me handle this.” He lets out a little “heh”—in a moment that displays his natural comedic timing. Instead of puffing his chest out, he goes even deeper with Hernández: “Why do you think we have such bad luck in love?” he cries out. Hernández takes the opportunity to confess a hard truth about himself, bellowing: “Honestly, I think I seek it out!”
In fact, the sketch is even more nuanced than non-Spanish-speaking SNL viewers will know, in part because of the live show’s limitations. The terse subtitles elide the subtleties of Hernández and Bad Bunny’s banter in Caribbean-inflected Spanish. (Hernández is Cuban and Dominican, and Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican.) When Hernández admits that “in his heart, I think I want a woman who’s off her rocker”—his literal phrase is “crazier than a coffee maker”—the subtitles neuter the sarcasm entirely, reading: “Because deep down I want a woman who is not mentally stable.” At other points the subtitles arrive too late, for instance making Bad Bunny’s expertly delivered lament—“Instead of thinking with our head, we think with the other one!”—land with a slightly awkward thud. Some parts of their dialogue aren’t even translated, such as when Bad Bunny says: “I feel you, brother.”
The gag at the end is that no one gets the table at all. Hernández and Bad Bunny agree that there are some perks to their current circumstances, particularly in the bedroom. They cackle and bro-hug, confusing Johanssen. “Why are you two laughing? What did you just say?” She didn’t know what was going on after all, because just like the barflies, she thought she was watching a telenovela: A machista argument about honor, resulting in blows and a triumphant return to their favorite two-top.
On the surface, this is just another SNL sketch about messed-up relationships and whether straight men are okay. But in its deliberate and inadvertent mistranslations, it also poses an intriguing question to its audience: How much truth can we really discern from a stranger that we watch from across the distance of a bar table or a language barrier? Nothing much, it turns out.
On May 24, 1961, the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. led a group of Freedom Riders on a 160-mile bus ride from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregation laws. The voyage and his subsequent arrest turned Coffin into a national figure in the fight for civil rights. Yet even as he made headlines, Coffin remained committed to another, quieter aspect of his role as a college chaplain. Over the course of his 18 years at Yale, he spent virtually every afternoon counseling students. They discussed relationships, academic worries, theological questions, and—for those eligible—the prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War. A priest first and foremost, he considered it “a great privilege” to enter what he called “the secret garden of another person’s soul.”
Today, at a moment when young people are much less likely to say they’re religious, you might think that the demand for college chaplains would be on the decline. But recent evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Although a 2022 report from the Public Religion Research Institute found that nearly 40 percent of young adults do not identify with any established religion, college students are actually attending religious-life programs in larger numbers than they have in decades, and many colleges and universities have more chaplains, some volunteer and some paid, than they did in the early 2000s, James W. Fraser, a professor emeritus of history and education at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book Religion and the American University, told me. Many of these chaplains are taking inspiration from Coffin: They’re reimagining what a spiritual leader can be in order to better meet the needs and beliefs of their students—many of whom, religious or not, still crave a sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose.
For centuries, religion was central to American university life. Many colleges were established as divinity schools and led by presidents who doubled as ordained ministers, John Schmalzbauer, a religious-studies professor at Missouri State University who studies chaplaincy and campus ministry, told me. But in the early 20th century, a great number of those institutions began shifting their focus from ministry to research, and college presidents started to devote less of their time to spiritual life. In their place, universities hired chaplains to preside over daily chapel services and offer moral guidance to students.
The shape of the college chaplaincy transformed multiple times over the next several decades—first during the Coffin era, when it became a platform from which to advocate for social justice; and again in the late 1970s and ’80s, when the social movements of the ’60s lost steam, academic communities became significantly less religious, and the college chaplaincy shed some of its previous status.
Modern college chaplains, deans, and directors of religious life have taken on a new grab bag of duties. In addition to leading forms of worship and talking with students about their faith, as they always have, many chaplains also help students navigate housing insecurity, safety threats, and campus protests. Although the position was once thought of as a “defined pot,” Kirstin Boswell, Elon University’s chaplain and dean of multifaith engagement, told me, it is now more an interdisciplinary “web.” The chaplains themselves are also much more diverse. Whereas the chaplaincy was once dominated by white Christian men, many today are women or people of color, and they come from a range of religious traditions. Of the 471 chaplains recently surveyed by the Association for Chaplaincy and Spiritual Life in Higher Education (ACSLHE)—the nation’s largest membership organization for university chaplains, directors, and deans of religious and spiritual life—6 percent said they don’t identify with a major religion, and 2 percent said they don’t believe in God at all.
Chaplains’ primary work is still counseling students, but many approach these conversations with more openness than their predecessors did. Reporting this story, I spoke with about a dozen college chaplains and campus-ministry experts across the country, several of whom sit on ACSLHE’s board. Citing their own experiences, which are backed up by a robust body of research, they explained that most modern-day chaplains both engage with established religious practices and embrace alternative forms of spirituality or self-care, which can be as varied as coloring sessions, friendship courses, and nature walks. Some students might see “the religious center as a place where someone would try to convert them,” Vanessa Gomez Brake, the senior associate dean of religious life at the University of Southern California and the first atheist-humanist to occupy that position at a major American university, told me. But chaplains today tend to draw from a range of texts and traditions, rather than proselytizing their own beliefs.
For less-religious students, some of their first conversations about spiritual matters may be with chaplains. At a stage of life when they are figuring out who they are and what they believe, many undergrads are likely to find themselves in a “hardwired body, mind, and soul spiritual growth spurt,” Lisa Miller, a clinical psychologist and the founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University, told me. Although religion is by no means necessary for navigating this growth spurt, it has historically served as a helpful starting point for many students. Until relatively recently, most American families were religious to some degree, which fostered “a de facto spiritual life in the air and water of our culture,” Miller explained. Regardless of their own religious beliefs, many teens used to arrive on campus with a “backpack of spiritual and religious practices.” Today, many show up having never prayed.
Perhaps because of students’ lack of exposure, contemporary college chaplains say they “have never felt more needed,” Schmalzbauer, of Missouri State, told me. Having devoted their lives to service and existential inquiry, chaplains can be well positioned to advise religious devotees, the spiritually curious, or just the average young person beset by angst. Their guidance might help undergrads as they sort through any number of uncertainties, whether about God, school, friendships, romance, family, or their undecided futures. “Students need someone who will hear them, who will sit with them, who will be present with them, and who won’t be on their phones in front of them,” Nathan Albert, ACSLHE’s board president and the chaplain at the University of Lynchburg, told me.
Of course, the help college students need is sometimes beyond what chaplains are trained to provide. Recent data show that Gen Z is, by some measures, the loneliest generation in the United States, and that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation on university campuses are at a peak. “These kids achieve to very high levels, they jump through the hoops, they get to college, and then they’re left wondering what it’s all for,” Jennifer Breheny Wallace, the author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—And What We Can Do About It, told me. Universities aren’t blind to the pressures students are under, and many have made student wellness a priority. This may be one reason more schools are investing in religious and spiritual life, Schmalzbauer, NYU’s Fraser, and others told me.
But crucially, as Schmalzbauer explained, pastoral care is not the same thing as psychological counseling. Chaplains can occasionally end up in tough spots, particularly as demand for mental-health care has outpaced the supply of therapists and psychiatrists on college campuses. Varun Soni, the dean of religious life at USC, told me that most of his students are dealing with routine anxieties, which he feels comfortable talking through. Yet he also meets with some students experiencing depression and suicidal ideation. For these more serious cases, Soni and his colleagues work closely with the university’s mental-health center and even walk students to a counselor’s door themselves.
This isn’t to say that chaplains don’t have a role to play in improving student health and well-being. Research from Columbia University’s Miller and others has found that spiritual development is associated with protection against depression and substance abuse, and with setting young adults up for healthier relationships, more purposeful work, and greater emotional resilience. In recent years, some schools have paired chaplains with therapists and counselors to provide “preventative mental health care,” Wendy Cadge, the president of Bryn Mawr College and founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, told me.
Yet, unlike mental-health professionals, the chaplain’s goal is not to treat students, but rather to help them find community, meaning, and a reprieve from the grind. “People want to feel loved for who they are and not what they do,” Chaz Lattimore Howard, the university chaplain and vice president for social equity and community at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Whether or not they believe in God, they “want to be reassured that it’s going to be okay.” In a world where so much may not seem okay, college chaplains say they can help students—not via certainty or quick fixes, but as Coffin once did: by tending to their inner lives.
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The Evening was small in the shadow of the other boats. When I arrived at the dock, it was well past midnight, and a misty rain was falling—the edge of a storm far out at sea. Mick, the captain, was blunt and salty; not old, but weathered. He led me on board and pointed down the ladder to the hull, where I immediately got into bed and fell asleep. When I woke up, Mick had gone into town, and I began to look around in the mute light of the overcast morning.
Our plan that October was to fish for albacore off the coast of Washington State. These would be short trips—four or five days at a time—to train me up for the summer, when I’d join Mick for a real voyage. I’d taken a Coast Guard course at a community college and had my Merchant Mariner certificate, but I’d never worked on a fishing boat before. In the daylight, the Evening looked ramshackle, as if it had survived 80 years in the northern Pacific more by luck than design. I found a few photos of Mick’s family, and the Evening’s Coast Guard certificate. “Constructed 1941, 43 feet, commercial (uninspected).” On deck, fishing lines were tangled with seaweed. Scattered everywhere were about a dozen rubber doormats stamped with the words Thankful, Grateful, and Blessed. On a workbench stood a statue of the Virgin Mary.
We spent a few days waiting for the weather to clear. Mick did paperwork and chores and I tidied the boat. One day we took the catch he had stored in the hold’s briny ice to a cannery on a spit of land between the ocean and Grays Harbor. Water from the Chehalis River flowed into the harbor, forming a standing wave where the two bodies met. I watched a ship leaving the harbor. When it crossed the river bar, it pitched and rolled. Mick and I would be taking the same route in a few days, but the Evening was half the size of that ship, old, and made of wood. The wave looked large enough to swallow us.
That afternoon, Mick suggested that we “take her out for a little spin.” Days of stormy weather had turned the water brown. Bobbing under the surface, barely visible, were entire trees that had washed down the Chehalis. Mick made sure I knew how to use the radio, and reminded me that the Coast Guard was on Channel 16. He pointed out the white canister on one wall that held the emergency radio beacon, which would go off automatically if submerged. The life raft, he explained, would release on its own.
The forecast finally showed minimal wind, minimal swell. We’d leave Thursday, October 12, 2023, and be back Sunday or Monday. On Wednesday night, I went out for a cheeseburger and called my mom. When she asked if I was excited, I said yes.
My parents thought I was throwing my life away. I was 27, and since graduating from the University of Virginia five years earlier, I’d been living in California, where I spent my time working at the counter of a surf shop, running cocktails to tourists on the ferry to Catalina Island, and surfing. In college, I’d talked about going to law school, or taking the Foreign Service exam. But as graduation approached, I began to look down the line at the rest of my life, and I knew I didn’t want that kind of career. I wasn’t sure I wanted any career at all.
I’d read East of Eden and Barbarian Days, and imagined California as a place where I could get far away from my East Coast upbringing, the collar-and-tie of my Episcopal-school childhood. I didn’t break the news to my parents until a week before my departure.
They said I hadn’t thought it through, that it didn’t sound like I had a plan. The lack of a plan was the point, I told them: “I’ll bus tables or whatever—I can find a job when I get there.” I could tell they thought the whole thing was ridiculous. In the end, I blew up at them. I told them I didn’t want the life they had chosen for me. I told them that they didn’t understand me, that I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want the blessings they’d given me.
After I left, I’d call home about once a month. They’d ask how I was doing; I’d tell them I was “figuring things out just fine.”
I bounced around—San Diego, Santa Cruz, Newport Beach—making friends and surfing as much as possible: daily, twice daily, sometimes all day long. But by the summer of 2023, I was restless. I would never have admitted it to my parents, but my job at the surf shop was getting old. Even surfing itself was beginning to feel rote—the same breaks, the same people, the same wave.
I wanted to get out of California, at least for a little while. I’d go to Australia for a year-long surfing bender. Maybe I’d meet some Australian girl—no, I definitely would—and never come back. I got a work visa. All I needed was enough money to make the trip.
Some of my friends had worked on fishing boats. One of them had spent a few seasons on a salmon boat in Alaska. He had shown me photos and told me the pay was good. In three months, I could earn enough to live on for a year. The idea of being out in deep waters appealed to me. Surf breaks are, by their nature, near shore, and even on my board, I couldn’t seem to escape the sounds of traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway. Bobbing at the ocean’s edge, waiting for waves that had started their lives as swells hundreds if not thousands of miles away, I began to wonder, What’s it like out there?
Another friend put me in touch with his old captain, a man named Michael Diamond. He introduced himself as Mick when we talked briefly over the phone. I’d do the practice runs with him in the fall to prepare for a three-month voyage over the summer. Then, Australia. He texted to confirm: “2 trips then you trained for next year.” “We can fish til they are gone and quit biting!”
We longlined for albacore that first day. We had some luck, bringing in maybe two or three dozen fish. It was hard work, but exhilarating, and the more we caught, the more I liked it. We fished until sunset, and ate rib eye for dinner. I climbed down to my bunk and fell asleep.
The second day, I woke at sunrise. The Evening was rocking from side to side, and it was harder to climb the ladder than it had been to go down it the night before. On the main deck, Mick had already gotten to work, setting up the lines on the boat’s starboard side.
The day before, we could see the horizon in all directions; now we had only a few hundred yards of visibility, and the boat pitched in the rising swells. We brought in two or three fish. By noon, Mick had called me off the deck to take cover from the wind and rain in the wheelhouse, where he lit a cigar.
The combination of the rolling boat and the smoke made my stomach turn. I needed fresh air. I went back outside. Waves were breaking over the bow, soaking my clothes, but I remained on the deck, bracing myself on the rails, for nearly an hour. When I couldn’t handle the cold anymore, I went back into the wheelhouse and found Mick resting in his berth—the rough seas had gotten to him, too. The Evening was on autopilot, on course back to the harbor.
I sat in the captain’s seat and tried to keep watch through the windshield, but I could barely see the waves before they slammed into the glass. The boat was rolling and pitching. As Mick slept, I watched our progress on the electronic chart: The boat was a small black triangle in a field of gray. We were maybe 20 miles offshore, and at our speed, it would be hours, well after sunset, before we reached the harbor. I was dizzy and nauseated and anxious, but watching our path in two simplified dimensions on-screen, I felt sure we’d make it.
But the storm kept picking up. An hour passed, then another, and we were still far from land. I half-crawled to the back of the wheelhouse and looked out the porthole. Waves began washing over the rails. A cooler was swept out to sea. There went our sandwiches. An even bigger wave pushed the stern underwater. I could feel the Evening’s center of gravity shift past the point of rebalancing. It was like leaning too far back in a chair.
I walked with one foot on the floor and the other on the wall to reach Mick. I shook him awake. “I think we need to get off now,” I told him. I reached for the radio and sent out a Mayday.
Mick opened his eyes but didn’t seem to understand. I pulled him out of bed and helped him into the seat behind the wheel. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. I could see seawater against the wheelhouse windows. We had to get out. I was sure Mick would follow, but when I turned around, he was frozen in the seat, gripping the armrests, looking straight through me. I shouted to him to come outside, but he didn’t move. Then I fell into the sea.
I was too shocked to feel cold. I could see the lines coming off the now-submerged masts and prayed I wouldn’t get tangled in one and be dragged down with the boat. I found the lid of the fishhold—a piece of wood insulated with foam—floating nearby and pulled myself on top of it. I was sure the Mayday had been transmitted. A helicopter would appear in no time to save us. I needed to stay afloat for half an hour, an hour at most. Then I saw the lifeboat, undeployed, floating in its canister a few feet away. I swam over and yanked the rip cord, and the raft inflated. I climbed in.
Gasping and shaking in the raft, I searched for Mick but couldn’t see him. The Evening had rolled onto its port side and was almost completely submerged. Then the bow rose suddenly upward and broke the surface. A plume of exhaust rushed out of the exposed pipe on the wheelhouse roof and the ship sank quickly. No more than five minutes had passed since I’d woken the captain.
The life raft was small but sheltered, like a kiddie pool but sturdier, and with a camping tent on top. The sides shuddered in the wind and rain, but I felt relatively safe inside. Certain that rescue was coming and exhausted by shock, I fell asleep.
When I awoke, the storm was still raging. I opened the flap for a moment, and saw the sun low in the sky. I didn’t know how much time had passed since I’d fallen asleep—maybe an hour, maybe an entire night. I needed to find some way to situate myself in this strange new reality, and began by taking inventory.
Dadu Shin
I had the clothes on my back: wool cap, flannel shirt, pants, boots, and a sweater, a Christmas gift from my grandmother. I had my phone (destroyed) and my wallet. On the raft, I found a collapsible oar, a first-aid kit, a small fishing kit, two emergency blankets, and an assortment of signals: four hand flares, three rocket flares, and three cans of orange smoke. I had food—a box of maybe a dozen emergency rations, which looked like beige bars of soap and tasted like oily shortbread—and two liters’ worth of drinking water, in individual packages.
The oar was useless in the rough seas, and I had no clue which way to row. I immediately wasted two flares, firing them into the air in the deluded hope that an approaching rescuer would see them. In the fishing kit was a razor blade, intended for filleting a hooked fish, though it seemed to invite another use. I thought of throwing it overboard, but instead stashed it away.
I tried not to worry. Getting a helicopter airborne probably took a little time, especially in a storm. Worst case—if our Mayday hadn’t been heard—someone would figure out we were missing and come looking. We were supposed to be gone for only four or five days, and if we didn’t return as planned, someone would notice—the harbormaster, or another captain, or our families. We’d left on Thursday and the ship had gone down on Friday. At the very latest, I figured I’d be rescued by Monday or Tuesday. I didn’t worry, at first, about my food or water running out. I just had to wait.
I thought a lot about Mick, wondering if I could have done more to save him, wondering why he’d been catatonic as the boat sank. I hadn’t seen any alcohol or drugs on the boat. Had he been seasick? Paralyzed by fear? Either way, I felt furious with him, and then guilty for my fury.
My first three or four days on the raft, the sky was so dark with storm clouds that I could barely see the sun move from east to west. With nothing to mark the hours, each day felt like it contained far more than 24. I remembered reading about Franciscan monks and how they ordered their days around work and prayer, and I decided I needed to devise my own routine, starting with a regular lookout.
Every morning, and then periodically throughout the day, I unzipped the flap that kept the wind and water out of the raft and checked to see if anything was out there—land, or a boat, or a plane. I bailed out water and wiped off the condensation that had accumulated inside the raft from my breath. I removed my clothes, one piece at a time, and hung them up on an interior bar of the shelter to dry, though they never fully did. I added new tasks when the need arose, such as blowing into a valve to reinflate the raft when it began to sag, and organizing and reorganizing my water, food, and flares.
Tossed by the waves, I could never sleep more than an hour or two at a time. I hadn’t been dry, not completely, since I’d fallen into the ocean. Soon the emergency blankets were worn to shreds. The silver foil deteriorated, exposing a sharp plastic mesh that cut into my waterlogged fingers. I tossed the scraps overboard, and from then on, I used the dry bag—a small rubber rucksack—as a blanket. It was hardly bigger than a pillowcase, but by ripping one of its seams and pulling my knees tight against my chest and my arms against my sides, I was able to cover myself nearly up to my collarbone. Desperate for any bit of warmth, I ignored the cramping discomfort it caused.
I prayed often, always aloud. At first, pleas for rescue. Over and over, I asked God to save me—not my soul, but my physical self. After days of praying the same prayer, I tried offering God something in return. First, I apologized for every past transgression I could remember. Any injustice or sin I feared I may have committed, I tried to atone for, so God would listen to my prayers. I used what I could recall of the Ten Commandments to accuse myself. I hadn’t honored the Sabbath in years; I had lied; I had coveted; I had stolen. Worst of all, I hadn’t honored my mother and father. I asked God to forgive me for the way I had treated my parents.
The life I’d chosen had put me in this situation. All the self-assurance I’d had that I could figure everything out on my own had led me here, and now I was going to lose my life and my parents were going to lose their son. Their doubts about my decision rose up in my mind and became my own doubts. I saw that my mom and dad had tried to discourage me not because they wanted to control me, but because they loved me. I wished I could tell them that I understood them now. I told God that I was sorry, for everything, and that if he gave me the chance, I’d do my best to make everything right.
I saw my first ship after five or maybe six days of drifting. I launched a flare into the sky. The ship was so close, I had no doubt the crew would spot me. I could see the containers it was carrying; the company’s name, Hapag-Lloyd, was painted on the side. As the rocket arced through the air, I imagined being lifted up out of the ocean. Someone would give me dry clothes and a hot meal, and they’d let me call my mom and dad on a satellite phone. I’d tell my parents what had happened and that I was all right. Then the ship would drop me off at its next port of call, and I’d fly back to California, and my life would return to normal—a happy, beautiful normal. I’d sit in traffic on the 55 with a smile on my face.
But as the flare rose, and fell, and was extinguished in the ocean, the ship kept going. Soon it disappeared over the horizon.
I’d been rationing my water, never consuming more than the equivalent of a small glass every 24 hours. But by the end of my first week on the raft, I knew that my distress signal would never be answered, that the emergency positioning beacon had failed to transmit. I was alone, and I was terribly, terribly thirsty.
What sense was there in suffering if all it meant was postponing the inevitable? I drank as much as I could stomach and closed my eyes. The next morning, I saw that no water was left.
I had strange, vivid dreams. Then I didn’t dream at all so much as hallucinate. As my eyes would begin to close, I’d hear splashing, like the breaching of a school of big fish, and then suddenly I’d feel that the raft was being propelled forward, as if on a towline, over the surface of the water. But every morning, I always seemed to be in the same place, at the center of the jumbled swells—rising, falling, sometimes breaking.
One night I dreamed that the life raft had washed ashore, on the bank of a pond. I stepped into the reeds, and then onto a road that led me to a small house. My friend Jack was sitting on the porch. He waved; he had been expecting me. But I was embarrassed—my clothes were wet and dirty, my hair tangled, my face covered with a patchy beard. I made an excuse. I told him my car had broken down and I was on my way into town to get a screwdriver. I’d be a little late for our appointment. “Don’t worry, take your time,” Jack told me. “Take all the time you need.” I walked back to the pond, climbed onto the life raft, and fell asleep. When I woke up for real, I opened the flap and found myself once again—still—in the middle of the ocean.
Even when I was awake, I had experiences that I couldn’t explain. One day, I sensed that I wasn’t alone in the life raft. I couldn’t see a figure or hear a voice, but I knew they were there, and I knew their name. It was the I.O.B. I said it to myself: “Eye-Oh-Bee.”
Was I losing my mind? I laughed at myself. Only a sane person would be able to laugh at himself, right? But I couldn’t shake the thought of the I.O.B. And I didn’t want to.
Dadu Shin
The I.O.B. brought me a sense of peace I hadn’t ever felt on the life raft. It wasn’t great company—it was silent and invisible, after all—but for the first time I felt like something, someone, was there to witness my continued existence, my choice to stay alive. I had often thought that if I died, and my body was never recovered, no one would ever know how desperately I had clung to life, how I’d fought to live even when despair felt absolute and overpowering. My parents wouldn’t know; my friends wouldn’t know. But the I.O.B. knew.
Not long after the I.O.B. appeared, I decided to open the flap, just a little, to see if anything was visible. In the eddy was a sunfish—a large, flat, primordial-looking bony fish—just a few feet from me. Its long, narrow dorsal fin broke the surface, oscillating gently, as if it were waving. I waved back.
By now I had lost track of time completely. The sea grew calm. One night, before the last of the clouds cleared, I was able to collect some rainwater to drink. It tasted cold and sweet. I even managed to catch a small fish. I bled it with the razor blade, and ate it to the bone. I threw the line back in the water, but didn’t catch another. Sometimes I could see land on the horizon, and I tried to row toward it, counting my strokes, into the hundreds, the thousands, but I never made it any closer.
I’d seen maybe five or six ships by then, most so far off that they’d looked like two-dimensional paper cutouts pasted on the horizon. I wasted my last rocket on them, and lit the hand flares, and popped canisters of thick orange smoke. For days I prayed that God would send more ships, but each time one passed and didn’t stop, I was left so bereft, so gutted by the brush with hope, that I began to feel that I would rather never see another. Now I had only one flare left. Holding on to it felt like holding on to life itself.
With the clearing of the storm, the temperature had dropped. During the day, the sun hitting the side of the raft was enough to keep me warm, but when night came, the cold set into my damp clothes and skin, and I shivered so violently, I couldn’t sleep. I was out of food, out of water. I knew I would not survive much longer. But even as my hope for rescue began to evaporate, so did my despair.
I was going to die. I didn’t look forward to it. I wanted to see my mom and dad again, my brother and sister, my friends. There was so much I still wanted to do. I fantasized about the smallest, most mundane things—waking up in bed, getting in my car, waiting at a red light, grabbing coffee, working. I wanted to do it all again, every day, forever and ever. But the idea of getting off the raft was becoming a distant hope, like winning the lottery—it would be really nice if it happened, but I didn’t expect it to, and I wasn’t going to tear myself up about it.
A peace I hadn’t known to look for found me. Where before I’d dreaded sunsets—the precursors to cold nights and strange dreams, and the mark of yet another day lost to the raft—now they were only sunsets, and sometimes I found them beautiful.
Yet another freezing, trembling night. At last the sun rose. Its light hit the side of the life raft, and I could feel it warming up, as if someone had lit a woodstove in the corner. Maybe now I could finally get some sleep. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and tried to let myself doze off, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t neglect my morning ritual, the first duties of my watch. I compromised with myself: I would do the morning lookout, and then get to sleep.
When I crawled across the raft and opened the flap, I saw it immediately—a boat, close enough that it actually looked real, and coming closer. I turned to get the flare, which I’d wedged into a corner. I hesitated. This was my last one.
Before I lit it, I began to scream at the very top of my lungs. I screamed until I felt as if my lungs were imploding, and kept going. When the boat was as close as it was going to get, I finally lit the flare.
The flame burned to the base, and when it reached my hand, I dropped the flare in the water, where the hot, burning metals cooled and groaned. I kept screaming, waving my hands over my head. I looked and sounded like a madman. When at last I ran out of breath, I fell silent. And in the silence, I heard someone answer me.
“We see you, we’re coming, we see you.”
I watched the boat change its course toward me, and the crew lowered a ladder and helped me aboard. The captain cooked me warm food, and a deckhand gave me dry clothes. I ate, and cried, and thanked them. It turned out that I’d drifted far from the harbor. The land I’d seen over the horizon was Vancouver Island, some 150 miles away from where the voyage had begun. The captain said he’d seen life rafts on the ocean before, but they’d always been empty. He asked me how long I’d been in the raft. I asked him for the date.
It had been 13 days.
The Canadian Coast Guard brought me ashore at Tofino, where I was taken to the hospital. Doctors worried that, after days of dehydration and deprivation, my kidneys or heart might fail. They took some blood, ran some tests, and, miraculously, I was fine. I could go home. A nurse brought me fresh clothes and led me to a shower. When I stripped out of my hospital gown, I was shocked by how thin I was—it was as if I could see all the bones and veins beneath my skin.
Two Mounties came to the hospital to take me to the border, and I walked across, back into the United States. Officials kept me there for a few hours, asking questions about the accident. At last they let me go, and a border agent helped me onto a bus to Seattle, where I caught a plane to Baltimore. My parents picked me up. A Welcome Home banner was hanging from the cherry tree in the front yard.
It was nearly November—a month of many birthdays for my family, including my own—and, with Thanksgiving right around the corner, I decided to stay awhile. My brother and sister came home from New York, and for a couple of weeks, the house was full. It was like we were observing a strange holiday that none of us knew how to celebrate. We negotiated the awkwardness by trying to act normal, but of course nothing felt normal. A few days earlier, I had thought I would never walk the dogs with my dad again, or sit in the kitchen drinking coffee with my mom, but there I was doing just that. I wanted to tell everyone how blessed I felt, but whatever words I considered felt far too small. I suspect they felt the same.
A few days after Thanksgiving, I left for California. When I was at the airport, waiting for my flight, I unfolded from my wallet a poem that my dad had written for me. My dad will be the first to say he isn’t much of a poet, and the poem relied heavily on an old Irish toast, but the last words, I’m certain, were his own: “Now carry on.”
Mick’s body was never recovered. In the spring, I drove to San Diego for his memorial. His son told a story about a trip they’d once taken to Hawaii. He and his friend were surfing while Mick fished, waist-deep in the water. A large set rolled in, knocking Mick off his feet. When his son found him washed up on the beach, he was soaked, but he was still holding on to his cigar, and it was still, somehow, lit.
When the memorial was over, Mick’s daughter gave me a hug, and told me she was happy I had come. But I felt guilty—that it was wrong that I was there when their dad was gone.
I’m grateful that I survived, but I don’t know why I did, or what it means. I still have no idea what I want to do with my life. When you’re lost at sea, certain you’re going to die in a life raft, you ask, Why me? and receive no answer. When you’re rescued and restored to life, you ask, Why me? and still there is no answer.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Lost at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
