Is the End of Reading Here? GenAI and the Reading Writing Classroom

“The End of Reading is Here” from The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch

  • Click here to link to the article in The Atlantic.
  • For Rose Horowitch’s profile page on X, click here.

Quotes from the article for discussion are bolded below and in quotes.

Click player above to listen to the “End of Reading” podcast episode

“…fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.”

This week my friend Dave Witzig texting me to ask what I’ve been reading…

Going to Huzzah Books in Boone to hear Zachary Vernon read from his book Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World

My wife and I are daily readers.

The resurgence of daughters, ages 18 and 20, reading.

I remember a faculty meeting around the year 2015 at St. John’s in Queens when I wondered aloud to my colleagues if reading was going to continue to be a primary way that people in their teens and 20’s learned. A few people thought it was a pretty funny joke. I wasn’t kidding.

“Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.”

Where do my kids get their news? I think exclusively from TikTok and Instagram.

The news sites I check out regularly…

  • ESPN, The New York Times, Fox News, The Atlantic
  • The challenge of figuring out news about the diarrhea lettuce.

“And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.”

What counts as reading? Does an audiobook count?

What counts as writing? The concepts we work with in composition applied to social media including YouTube.

Is counting overrated?

The stamina of attention span.

I use GenAI platforms. If you use them for everything, what might you miss?

  • Writing as a tool for knowing.
  • You still have to “know stuff” to use GenAI the same way you have to “know stuff” to use a Google or Library Database Search. For example, you might have to have read to know who Dean Oliver is as you pursue an effective way to use basketball analytics as a coach. Students might throw around the word “pedagogy” in a reflection because GenAI produced it for them. Students who copy and paste from GenAI don’t always see how their texts stand out in a negative way among all the other texts that students turn in.

“And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever.”

One of the things I like about books: a person has taken the time to pull the text together. For me, a book doesn’t diappear into the ether the way an article is more likely to. Of course, there are exceptions!

“Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.”

  • I am least partially guilty while at the same time trying to draw the students I work with into reading.
  • Getting assigned 5 books in a week in graduate school (didn’t read it all) while at the same time showing up to a first class having read the whole text already.
  • Reading workshops. I’m doing my favorite thing right now except for that I’m doing it on my own.

The Last 5 Books I Read and Enjoyed:

  1. The Contemporary American Essay edited by Phillip Lopate
  2. Rapture by Nick Nurse with Michael Sokolove
  3. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (about David Foster Wallace) by D.T. Max
  4. Heartland (about Larry Bird at Indiana State) by Keith O’Brien
  5. True and False Magic by Phil Stutz. (Three constants: Pain, Uncertainty, and The Need for Constant Work)

Did I read or watch any other stories this week?

  1. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. She acts like a patient for med students.
  2. Domestic Gulags by Laura Kipnis. A huge list of stuff like this: You can’t be a slob. You can’t do less than 50 percent around the house, even if the other person wants to do 100 to 200 percent more housecleaning than you find necessary or even reasonable.
  3. Ann; Death and The Maiden by David Lazar. About an old relationship in which the former partner takes their life.
  4. The Hawk tv series on Netflix starring Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Luke Wilson. Crass and explicit. At times laugh out loud funny. Introduced me to Fortune Feimster who both of my kids new from social media.

Thanks for taking the time to visit Torg Stories!

From Los Angeles to Warsaw, Poland: Anne from the PURO Warszawa State Miasto

My sister Anne has travelled to Poland where she will see Bad Bunny in Warsaw and travel to Krakow and Prague. In preparation for this conversation, I read “Notes from Poland” by Kenneth Sherman.

Click on audio player above to listen to the “Anne in Poland” episode

Topics for discussion from “Void and Voice: Notes from Poland.” The article was written by Kenneth Sherman and published in Creative Nonfiction. Click here to access. I’m excited to look at the Creative Nonfiction archives!

The writer Kenneth Sherman goes back to Poland in a reverse trip from what his grandfather took 93 years before. I consider a trip to Norway to trace the places my own ancestors lived. Anne did one of those DNA tests and it reported we’re 25% Norwegian.

  • The idea of a pilgrimage. 

Some lines from the piece for a TRUE or FALSE Discussion:

  • A people’s grave, especially if it is ones own people, is a very special place in one’s psychic map. 
  • After a time, being a tourist becomes merely an exercise, an accumulating of numerous dates and sites. Mind travel is usually superior to the geographical kind. 
  • On the tombstones… They lean this way and that, like crooked teeth. 

Stuff I didn’t know before or stuff I thought more deeply about because of Sherman’s piece:

  1. Treblinka: Nazi extermination camp in Poland 
  2. The Polish people under the rule of Nazis. 
  3. Poland divided and disappears for over 100 years starting in the late 1700s. Anne, what do you know about Polish history? 

I looked into some other texts related to Bad Bunny and/or Poland: 

  1. The World’s Newest Superhero: Bad Bunny by Carina Chocano in GQ. Click here. 
  2. Unquiet Days at Home in Poland by Thomas R Swick. Click here for Amazon link. 
  3. Exit into History: A Journey Through New Eastern Europe. Click here for Amazon link. 
  4. Milk Bar article in the NY Times click here. 
  5. A sweet bun so good it inspired a national holiday. BBC. Click here. 
  • From the article: As the days grow warmer in Poland, our forests teem with beautiful fruits like strawberries and plums, which we will eagerly fold into light, delicious summer dishes. By far, the most anticipated seasonal crop is the bilberry, the blueberry’s smaller and tarter European cousin.
  1. The 2018 film Cold War directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Nominated for three Academy Awards and available to stream on Amazon. Click here to connect with film on Amazon. 

Some Bad Bunny tour dates: 

  • Stockholm Sweden last July 11th 
  • Warsaw Tues July 14th (the show Anne is going to)
  • Milan Italy July 17 and 18
  • Brussels, Belgium after that…

Anne’s list of content she read or watched related to her trip to Poland to see Bad Bunny.  (Add link when possible). 

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/travel/dan-brown-the-secret-of-secrets-prague.html  Prague (also going to Czech Republic)
  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/travel/warsaw-nightlife-clubs-edm-djs.html I won’t go to clubs, but it’s an interesting read. The writer is stayed at the hotel I’m staying at. No photos!
  2. https://culture.pl/en/article/warsaw-everything-that-was examining the rebuild of the destroyed city and

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“Why We Travel” by Pico Iyer and Anne is Headed for Bad Bunny in Poland

If you travel, why do you go where you go? I’ll bet your reasons are different from Pico Iyer’s, as explained in his essay “Why We Travel.” We pick out some lines for discussion below as well as look toward Anne’s trip to Poland that will include attending a Bad Bunny concert in Warsaw.

“Why We Travel” is an essay by Pico Iyer published on Salon.com on March 18, 2000. Click here to read it. 

Before I read Iyer’s piece, I jotted down some thoughts I have on my own travel: 

  1. I don’t seem to be able to enjoy traveling without doing a research project first. From the Charlotte concert we went to (train, where to eat, stores to walk through) to walking around Savannah or going to Maui.
  2. Parts of my travel preparation: multiple books, lots of Google Earth scrolling, following social media accounts, and lots of Google Doc notes. 
  • Also: I’ve presented on multiple trips to the family and they’ve picked 
  • Also: I write out the directions for the bus before I travel to an away basketball contest 
  1. I’ve become more fearful / anxious. Maybe why? daughters and wife, getting older. 
  2. I have right next to zero travel abroad experience. 

If I could go anywhere this summer, where would I chose?

My daughter Izzy asked me if I could travel to any country, where would I go?

  • I said Switzerland, and here are the reasons I could think I would want to go to Switzerland:
  1. Wherever I’m going with my family, the connections formed doing something such as waiting to board the plane can’t be underrated. Speaks to that cliche, the journey not the destination. 
  2. I’ve seen the beauty in pictures or videos, and I’d like to walk within it all myself. 
  3. Experience a place different than I’ve been before. Look how it’s done here, whether that’s Queens, Winamac Indiana, Charleston, Miami, Phoenix, LA, Maui, or London. 

Here’s the opening paragraph of the essay. There’s a lot to discuss in it: 

  • We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. 

Some lines I chose from the essay to discuss: 

  1. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.
  2. Our only exchange like this is money? I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
  3. The idea of seeing with new eyes: By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes.
  4. Anne, you probably don’t know what you will do? On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
  5. Reminds me of Geoff Dyer bringing in Nietzsche on habits: This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear” — disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide.
  6. The metaphor that travel is a love story: All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
  7. What do you call yourself? I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman.
  8. What have you brought back from previous trips? The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center. (Torg remembers his French Broad Trip, the mushroom hunt with his father) 

What new reasons in this essay might there be to travel? 

  1. We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home.
  2. holidays help you appreciate your own home more
  3. All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips,
  4. So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake.

This piece of loaded with references to what other writers say. Sometimes it’s a quote and other times the author refers to just talking with someone. 

  • I counted 22 references to what other writers said.  In the piece. This sort of thing impresses me that the writer is familiar with all of those facets of the conversation within travel writing.

Anne, does reading this and discussing it change your thinking at all about your trip? 

Trump is the United State President. Does that impact how you think about your trip? 

  • I think those here for the World Cup are finding that we all aren’t Trump or Trump Disciplines. 

What’s your prep like for a trip like you are taking? Buying guidebooks? Working on notes? Working on an itinerary? 

Some notes on the author Pico Iyer: 

  • @PicoIyer on X. Click here for profile. 
  • From Wikipedia: English born in Oxford son of Indian parents, both academics, moved to California when father started teaching at Univ of California at Santa Barbara, studied English Lit at Magdalen College Oxford, taught writing at Harvard and then started writing at Time, has lived in Nara, Japan since 1992 and has a Japanese wife, I counted 18 books written on his Wikipedia page 

For today’s episode, I almost picked a chapter from this book: 

  • Michael Palin wrote a book called New Europe in which there is a chapter about him travelling to Poland. I almost bought it and had us read that. 

Thanks for taking time to visit Torg Stories!

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with Particular Reference to Doughnut Plant Doughnuts)

My sister Anne spells it donuts and I use doughnuts. We both went out and ate some for this post, and we had a good time discussing Geoff Dyer’s essay “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with Particular Reference to Doughnut Plant Doughnuts” as the catalyst for this week’s conversion.

Click above to listen to our donut or doughnut themed podcast

Sometimes donuts are trash (sometimes I still eat them)

-Anne on her donut consumption

Torg got his doughnuts from Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee in Boone, NC.

  • Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee. 791 Blowing Rock Road. Boone, NC. 
  • I appreciated this about the owners of Local Lion from their website: Josiah was born and brewed in Boone NC . He met Meredith as she was serving coffee on Appstate Campus and they settled into this beautiful mountain town.  Together they founded Local Lion in Spring of 2012. Early mornings making scratchmade doughnuts and  fresh roasting coffee are an excellent way to serve community. We love being an integral part of the high country.

Los Angeles Doughnuts from Anne:

Dyer’s piece opens with Effra Road as the metaphorical (and literal for the the writer) roads we all have to travel. Here are the opening lines of the piece:

  • For many years I lived in various flats either on or just off Brixton Water Lane. So I was always walking, cycling, or taking a bus down Effra Road. How many times did I walk down Effra Road? How many hours did I spend walking down Effra Road? If I was going to Brixton Rec to play squash, or to Franco’s for a pizza or a cappuccino (this was before I acquired the refinement of taste in cappuccinos that, in the years since then, has invariably been a source of torment and frustration rather than enhanced satisfaction), or to the aptly named Effra to meet friends for drinks, or just to take the tube to some other part of London, I always had to trudge or cycle down Effra Road. Wherever I was going, the journey began and ended on Effra Road. One of the reasons I moved away from Brixton was that I could not face trudging, cycling, or taking the bus down Effra Road again.

Torg’s potential Effra Roads: 

  • Ditmars Blvd in Astoria, Queens, NYC. 
  • It was a half mile walk from my apartment near Astoria Park and the East River from the N and W stop of NYC subway. Didn’t live there long enough to get that tired of it. 
  • It did have Martha’s Country Bakery, which we have never forgotten. Click here. Cookies and cakes but I don’t remember doughnuts. 
  • Would I usually rather have a cookie than a doughnut? 
  • AND, Dewitt Barnett Road near Valle Crucis, NC. We’ve got this 10 minute very curvy drive almost every time we leave the house. 

Anne’s potential Effra Roads:

  • La Brea and Melrose. I start on these streets all the time, maybe throw Santa Monica Blvd. in there.
  • Great donut place in Brownsburg IN. Hilligoss Bakery
  • Also Long’s Bakery in Indianapolis, kind of by Speedway
  • In Brownsburg, I would often go to a great gas station right by work. Get a Diet Mt Dew from fountain (not frequently available elsewhere) and a cinnamon type cake donut. Best donuts I ever had from a gas station. Casey’s gas station, a chain. I do not see them out here.
  • In Indiana, I used to go most Sundays and read the Sunday paper at Einstein Bagels I think around 82nd street on the west side where I would hope they would have a chocolate chip cookie cake that was round, I forget the name, but loved that sometimes they would run out just like in the story. I would get it warmed up.

The Nietzsche “enduring habits” section: 

  • Nietzsche loved what he called “brief habits” but so hated “enduring habits” that he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that caused him to break free of the chains of enduring habit. (Though most intolerable of all, he went on, would be “a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.”) Unlike Nietzsche, I succumb all too easily to enduring habits. Programmed by habit, I kept going to Patisserie Valerie until I met the woman who became my wife.

 I am challenged about my enduring habits: 

  • Morning coffee and yogurt with Megan, right to the desk to work, a feel of needing to be at the desk 
  • To what degree, if any, do these need to be broken? 

Reminds me of how I used to say instead of going on vacation there we should just move there for a while. That feels different now.

Anne’s LA Habits

  • Used to get a fountain drink most mornings from 7-eleven. Do not do that as much. Used to also get a bagel maybe once a week, also do not do now. Now I get to work, have a diet coke and a protein bar.
  • My morning routine for work is simple, wake up, shower, dry hair get ready/dressed, sit on couch for 10 minutes and browse internet, then leave around 6:55 am.
  • Weekend habit. Work out and hike on Sat and Sun, hoping always to be done by 10 am. Mostly Runyon, occasionally Griffith

Torg Golden Lines from the piece for brief discussion: 

  • Psychologically, the location of a place is not fixed. It is determined not by where it is but by how we get to it.
  • Funny!: I went back to Delectica the following day and ordered another cappuccino and a doughnut. The doughnut I ordered that day was a ring doughnut, and it was an amazing doughnut. This was a major turning point in my New York life. As such, it will feature prominently in my forthcoming book Great Pastries of the World: A Personal View.
  • Not what happened to us at Bruno’s Pizza in Logansport: It was still there and we ordered cappuccinos and croissants, and the croissant, while it was just about tolerable, was nowhere near as good as I remembered and the coffee was pretty terrible (too milky and the foam was all bubbly, and although it seemed okay at first, by the halfway stage I decided it was totally revolting).
  • The last sentence. As we keep this up Anne, I am seeing that writers often like to go long in the last or second to last sentence: It did not seem like that at all now; now it became a symbol of the healing potential of the doughnut, of a world community of doughnut lovers living in peace and harmony, bound together by the vision and ambition of a Czech immigrant who went to New York, opened his Doughnut Plant, and then forged a doughnut empire, extending from New York to Tokyo while regrettably bypassing London, where we still have to make do with croissants that are like stale buns so that at times the whole of London seems like nothing else so much as an interminable extension of Effra Road.

What does he mean “the human condition” in the title? 

Anne: My general notes on book. I hate becoming known at a place, even though I know I do become known, esp because I have weird orders (Quiznos which is now closed used to be this for me). Writer likes going to a place and being a regular.

Anne’s LA Move:

  • Opened up my life to a more city feel, a walking city feel, even though everyone says LA is not a walkable city. It is not for the expanse of the city, but it is very much walkable in certain neighborhoods.
  • I feel energy and happenings here much more, I feel more connected to people even though I myself am quite to myself.

We could order Doughnut Plant doughnuts shipped to us. Click here to check that out. 

Anne’s Fav Desserts:

  • Cake. No fruit type cake (like a little layer of jam, yuck) Best cakes are the basic cakes IMO. Vanilla/Vanilla. I prefer that over chocolate. Birthday cake flavor also great.
  • Warm cookies
  • A great donut 

Thanks for checking out Torg Stories!

Untold Epstein Story, San Antonio Love Triangle, World Cup Mbappe, Widow’s Bay, and Three Billboards

Anne and I share the stories we read or watched on this week’s Torg Stories Podcast. Check out the links to some of the stories below:

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of June 15, 2026

“The Infamous San Antonio Love Triangle That Ended in Murder” by Katy Vine 

  • https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/san-antonio-three-emmas-legend/
  • Pearl Beer magnate Otto Koehler killed by one of his mistresses in 1914. His wife, his mistress & wife’s nurse and his 2nd mistress all named Emma. The Three Emmas
  • After his death his wife reemerged back into society. Was her sickness something he kind of forced on her? A “nervous disorder”. She became the pres if the beer association even
  • Authorities wanted to protect rep and the city’s brewers from investigators so sort of swept it under the rug.
  • Who was the man who was allowed to leave?
  • The 2 emma nurses lived in a house together bought by Otto. Affair stopped when the 1st mistress met a man and got married, so then he got with 2nd mistress. Then the next year he decided to do a payoff and break it off. They thought she was going to be possibly killed by him? She claims he started to choke her, then the other Emma came in and so she got a gun to save the other emma.
  • Site of the Pearl Brewing Co. is now a mixed use site called the Pearl which is very popular, including the previously mentioned in our podcast (in relation to the NBA), San Antonio’s best hotel in San Antonio “Hotel Emma”
  • Cocktails are named after the emmas etc.

Kylian Mbappe is Scoring All the Goals – and Taking All the Heat”

Vanity Fair, by Aidan Mclaughlin

Widow’s Bay, AppleTV final episode, Creator Katie Dipold, was a Parks & Rec writer, wrote the movie “The Heat” which is a terrific comedy

  • Got renewed, nice twist at the end
  • Good laughs again at the end.
  • Had some nods to Lost with the underground ladder

Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of June 15, 2026

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri 

  • Stars Frances McDormand as a mom whose daughter was raped and killed, Woody Harrelson as the town sherriff with cancer, and Sam Rockwell as a racist drunk town cop. Peter Dinklage (Elf and I Care A lot are two of my favorites of his) 
  • Set in Sylva, North Carolina! 
  • Came out in 2017. 
  • My kind of title! 
  • 7 academy nominations and 3 wins for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor 
  • Rockwell is in another great movie you haven’t seen: The Green Mile. 
  • Interesting stuff from Wikipedia about McDormand: grew up in IL, adopted and name change from Cynthia Ann Smith, adopted dad a Disciples of Christ preacher
  • Married to Joel Coen! 
  • Amazing job from moving around the Midwest and South eventually to the Yale School of Drama. 
  • I watched it on HBO Max. 
  • There’s a screenwriting book called Save the Cat and it tells you to just have someone state the theme out loud. I feel like it’s this for this film: violence begets violence. 

“The Untold Story of Jeffrey Epstein’s Death,” a NY Times Exclusive by Charles Homans, Steve Eder, Jan Ransom, and Michael Rothfeld 

  • Click here for the article. 
  • It’s one of those amazing interactive multimedia articles with lots of pictures from the jail and the scene where Epstein died. Also… shot of the outside of the prison that zooms inside, shows a map, and then labels the areas of the prison where Epstein was, 3D tour of the hub of that floor like you’d see on a real estate listing
  • Really works to bring to life the story. Here are the opening two paragraphs: Late in the afternoon of July 6, 2019, about a dozen F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department officers gathered at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, waiting out of view of the tarmac so as not to spook their quarry. The day before, they received an email informing them that a private jet would be arriving at 5:20 p.m. Attached to the email was an arrest warrant for its lone passenger, Jeffrey Epstein.Returning from Paris, Epstein was making plans on his phone: a trip to his private island in the Caribbean, a documentary interview with Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser. When the plane touched down, customs agents boarded to check the passports of Epstein and the plane’s two pilots. Then they escorted Epstein into the terminal, where an F.B.I. agent and a detective told him he was under arrest.
  • Bad working conditions for the guards. Guards not doing their jobs in some ways understandably. Cameras not working. Just a dysfunctional situation. 
  • Interviews and pictures with guards. 
  • Interesting Epstein could be scared, shocked and depressed, but also intimidating because of his wealth and access to lawyers who could cause lots of problems for everyone he encountered. 
  • It would have taken a massive conspiracy given all the levels of security, different sets of keys, etc. 
  • Last two paragraphs: In the end, the autopsy photos were like everything else in the Epstein case, offering more possibilities than conclusions. Every question was easier to ask than to answer. It made the case the perfect petri dish for conspiracy theories, a space in which nothing could definitively be proved wrong, as long as someone wanted to believe in it. It is fitting, then, that the last known image of Epstein alive appears to be a brief fragment of surveillance camera footage at 7:49 p.m. on Aug. 9, the last full day of his life, after his final phone call, as he was led back to his cell for the last time. In it, he is little more than a silver head of hair, visible for a split second — stripped of his wealth and influence, reduced to something vague, elusive, a blur, a ghost. He is there, and then he is gone.

Thanks for taking time to visit Torg Stories!