Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: A Clinic on Trial in the Alps, a Ski Descent of Everest, and a Novel Accused of Being Written by AI
Five long reads published October 26 – November 1, 2026: a Swiss alternative-medicine clinic charged over two patient deaths, a first ski descent of Everest's Hornbein Couloir, an American ambassador in Paris, the market for 'best babies', and the French novel accused of being written by AI.
Five long reads published between October 26 and November 1, 2026.
Three of this week's strongest pieces turn on a single measurement, and each one spends its length arguing over what that measurement proves. At a clinic in the Appenzell hills, the measurement is a platelet count. In Paris literary circles, it is a score from an AI-detection program. In a Norwegian living room, it is a gene test that overturned a diagnosis its subject had lived inside since he was three.
The other two are profiles. One follows a skier who went back to the mountain that killed his partner. The other follows an American ambassador in Paris who treats the posting as a family business.
The week in one glance
| Essay | Publication | Author | Date | Estimated read | Why spend the time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Did an Alternative-Medicine Guru Accidentally Kill Patients? | The New Yorker | D. T. Max | October 26, 2026 1 | About 33 minutes | Two patients, two infusions, one prosecutor's file, and a doctor who keeps explaining that they came to him already dying. |
| Charles Kushner and the MAGA Ambassador's Playbook | The New Yorker | Lauren Collins | October 26, 2026 2 | About 29 minutes | What the Paris embassy looks like when it is run as an extension of the family, with the French officials who have to work around it. |
| How Jim Morrison Surmounted Tragedy and Skied Down Everest | The New Yorker | Nick Paumgarten | October 26, 2026 3 | About 22 minutes | A first descent of the Hornbein Couloir, and a man rebuilding a life on the activity that killed the person he loved. |
| Would you pay to have the 'best baby'? | The Guardian (The Long Read) | Jan Grue | October 27, 2026 4 | About 15 minutes | The case against embryo selection made by a man who spent his childhood longing for a cure, and did not get one. |
| 'A Doubt That Takes Easily' | The New York Review of Books | Ursula Lindsey | October 29, 2026 5 | About 13 minutes | The French novel accused of being written by AI, read closely by someone who separates the accusation from the book. |
1. Did an Alternative-Medicine Guru Accidentally Kill Patients?
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: D. T. Max
- Date: October 26, 2026
- Estimated read: About 33 minutes (8,163 words)
- Original: Read the investigation
Thomas Rau is seventy-six and has practised medicine for forty-four years. Most of that time he has worked in Appenzell Ausserrhoden, the Swiss canton that has been selling cures since the eighteenth century. His clinic, BioMed, and the Sonnenberg Health Hotel beside it stand on a hilltop in Schwellbrunn, a village of about fifteen hundred people, an hour east of Zurich. Guests stay for weeks and spend tens of thousands of dollars. 1
Rau calls the practice biological medicine. He diagnoses with dark-field microscopy, watching a drop of the patient's blood for clumping or "stacked rings" that he reads as toxins or inflammation. Treatment runs to colon hydrotherapy, ozone infusions, infrared hyperthermia, intravenous alpha-lipoic acid, and injections of selenium and mistletoe. He describes himself, at a conference in Brooklyn, as "the master in rebuilding cellular function."
Doris Ammann, a Zurich art dealer in her mid-seventies, came on March 18, 2021, for prevention, with a tremor on her left side. She had a colonic irrigation, a vegan lunch with Rau, then an infusion of alpha-lipoic acid followed by mugwort. As her chauffeur loaded the car, she began screaming from abdominal pain. She vomited black fluid that night and slept at the hotel. In the morning Rau noted in her log that sepsis was possible, and let her go home anyway. She was back in hospital within hours and died at University Hospital Zurich, of cardiovascular failure and septic shock. Her gallery later sold Warhol's "Shot Sage Blue Marilyn" for a hundred and ninety-five million dollars. 1
About a week later, Evie Lanitis, seventy, arrived from a wealthy Cypriot family with minor complaints: bursitis in her toes, dental pain, digestive trouble. Her daughter says her mother erred on the side of hypochondria. She wanted the stamina to be a good grandmother, and her first grandchild was due in three months. Yarrow compresses, a ginger wrap, hyperthermia and a colon cleanse came first, then an intravenous infusion of alpha-lipoic acid. Within hours her platelet count fell to seventy-nine billion per litre, against a normal range of a hundred and fifty to four hundred billion. She died the next day in St. Gallen. 1
An American patient, Mary Anne Hawrylak, had the same infusion a few hours before Lanitis did, felt dizzy and confused, and recovered; she is a physically larger woman. Max uses her account of the evening Rau called the guests into the library to announce that a patient had died and that the infusions would stop. The guests, she said, were angrier about losing their treatments than about the death. 1
In March, prosecutors in Appenzell Ausserrhoden charged Rau and his colleague Alexandra Kotthaus with two counts of negligent homicide and sent the case to a judge. No trial date has been set. The prosecutor has asked for a suspended fourteen-month sentence for Rau and ten months for Kotthaus. 1
A postmortem expert at the Zurich hospital found that Rau missed clear signs of intestinal paralysis in Ammann and failed to answer severe gastrointestinal bleeding. The report says she belonged in a surgical clinic, where cases like hers have an excellent prognosis, and calls BioMed's diagnostic effort "incomprehensible." Rau disputes the report and has commissioned a counter-opinion. 1
His defence is consistent. "They came super sick to us," he told Max at the Brooklyn event in 2024. "I sent them to the hospital, and then they died in the hospital." He added, a beat later, that they died "in spite of me." He points out that he reported Lanitis's death to the canton himself, which he says nobody covering anything up would have done. 1
The case has a long tail. In 2003 Rau injected Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, a former United Nations high commissioner for refugees, in the chest with selenium and mistletoe; an infection followed, and the prince died nine months later in Boston, having asked his family to sue. In 2014 Swissmedic found that Rau's earlier clinic had distributed prohibited medicines. 1
American regulators take a different view of the toolkit. The F.D.A. does not consider live-blood analysis reliable, and says ozone has no known useful medical application. Switzerland is more permissive: in a 2009 referendum, sixty-seven per cent of voters backed integrating nonconventional medicine into the health system. The clinic stayed open through the inquiry. Its foreign clientele, a large share of the business, had no idea the deaths were being investigated. 1
The paper trail is what this piece adds to a familiar argument. Max works from patient logs, prosecutors' interviews, a WhatsApp exchange in which the hotel manager and a restaurant employee try to remember "who all died, names and number of deceased," and a Sunday investigation in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from November 2023. The Lanitis family's lawyer doubts the canton will have the courage to take Rau's licence. Rau's lawyer says he is ready to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. 1
Why this one: Most writing about alternative medicine argues about whether it works. This piece takes the next question, which is harder: what a clinic owes a patient when it is accused of killing her, and what a canton does about a doctor who is eminent, seventy-six and locally beloved. Thirty-three minutes buys the patient log, the expert report, the cross-examination and the defendant's own account, all in one place.
2. Charles Kushner and the MAGA Ambassador's Playbook
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: Lauren Collins
- Date: October 26, 2026
- Estimated read: About 29 minutes (7,259 words)
- Original: Read the profile
For the Fourth of July, Charles Kushner, the American ambassador to France and Monaco, held a party on the lawn of the Hôtel de Pontalba, the residence next to the Élysée. Guests ate fajitas, pronounced with a hard "j," under a placard promising that the food was kosher and rabbinically supervised. A V.I.P. section stood behind red velvet ropes. Andrea Bocelli, in an iridescent dinner jacket, sang "Nessun dorma" for Bernard Arnault of LVMH, the evening's sponsor and guest of honour. 2
Six weeks after arriving in Paris in July 2025, Kushner published an open letter to Emmanuel Macron in the Wall Street Journal, accusing the French government of letting the country become a bastion of antisemitism. Article 41 of the 1961 Vienna Convention forbids an ambassador to interfere in the internal affairs of the host country. The foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, summoned him. Kushner did not go. 2
In February, after a far-right activist died of injuries from a street fight in Lyon, the embassy posted on X that "violent left-wing extremism is on the rise." Barrot summoned him again. When Kushner again stayed away, the minister temporarily barred him from meeting members of the French government, citing his "apparent misunderstanding of the basic expectations of an ambassador." Kushner's own account of the snub is the line that explains the whole piece: "I'm seventy-two years old. I'm not getting called to the principal at this stage in my life." 2
He is the extreme case of a wider change. In recent decades about seventy per cent of American ambassadorships went to career diplomats. About twenty per cent of the ambassadors Trump has appointed since his reëlection have any professional experience in diplomacy, and his hundred and twenty-two appointees include a restaurant mogul, a musical producer, a former running back and his son's ex-fiancée. Ninety-three posts stand empty, among them Germany and the United Arab Emirates. An estimated one in four serving Foreign Service officers has left the government. 2
Kushner speaks no French, and Paris is the first place he has lived outside the United States. In 2004 he pleaded guilty to eighteen counts of tax fraud, witness intimidation and campaign-finance violations, after hiring a sex worker to seduce his sister's husband and mailing the tape to her just before her son's engagement party. He served eight months of a twenty-four-month sentence and was pardoned in 2020. Chris Christie, who prosecuted him, calls him "the most disgusting defendant" he encountered in his career. 2
The family history explains part of the appointment's logic. Kushner's parents were Polish Holocaust survivors. His father hid with the Bielski partisans; his mother, in the Novogrudok ghetto, watched the Nazis murder her mother and a sister, then escaped through a tunnel dug by villagers. Charles was named for her brother Chanan, who was lost in the escape. 2
On the substance of the open letter, Kushner has numbers behind him. Antisemitic acts in France rose from fewer than five hundred in 2022 to more than fifteen hundred in both 2023 and 2024, and stood at 1,320 last year. French Jewish leaders object to the letter anyway. Yonathan Arfi pointed to twenty years of regular dialogue with the authorities. The lawyer Patrick Klugman told Collins the effect was to make French Jews look "as if they were not French but under American jurisdiction or protection." 2
Kushner has since invited Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the Rassemblement National to the residence and posted the photograph. Asked about the party's history — Le Pen's father called the gas chambers a detail of history — he says he put the question to her directly and accepted her answer. Collins also asks him about antisemitic messages Bardella is alleged to have sent as a young activist, which Bardella denies, and gets a reply about Bardella's visits to Israel. 2
He tried to visit Nicolas Sarkozy in prison last year, and later seated him at the Fourth of July party next to the Arnaults. Jailing a former president, Kushner said, was "a terrible slap in the face to France." Asked whether people in positions of power should face prosecution at all, he said he would feel differently if Sarkozy had shot somebody in the street. 2
The French officials Collins interviews read the posting as part of a pattern. Pierre Haski of Reporters Without Borders was visited by two State Department officials who questioned him about Le Pen's conviction and, according to Le Monde, compared France to North Korea. Magali Lafourcade, of the national human rights commission, had a similar meeting, found it intimidating enough to report to the foreign ministry, and later had her X account suspended. 2
The stakes are electoral. France votes for president in May, Macron cannot stand again, and Le Pen leads the polling. Amy Greene of the Institut Montaigne says Trumpist actors see France as a hopeful horizon: if a nuclear power with Europe's second-largest economy goes to the far right, the rest of the continent follows. 2
Why this one: Ambassador scandals usually arrive as single anecdotes, and this one has plenty: the velvet ropes, the summons ignored, the wine sent to Christie's table. Collins stays for the rest of the file — the résumé, the parents, the antisemitism statistics, the French Jews who say the letter made their position worse, and an ambassador who is more careful in private than his public statements suggest.
3. How Jim Morrison Surmounted Tragedy and Skied Down Everest
- Publication: The New Yorker
- Author: Nick Paumgarten
- Date: October 26, 2026
- Estimated read: About 22 minutes (5,384 words)
- Original: Read the profile
On October 15 last year, a dozen climbers reached the summit of Everest by a route five people had ever completed: the Super Direct, up the Hornbein and Japanese couloirs on the Tibetan north face. Jim Morrison scattered some of Hilaree Nelson's ashes at the top, clicked into his skis and descended the Hornbein. The run took four hours. A World Cup downhill takes two minutes. 3
The line had been Morrison's obsession since he was a teenager. It runs up to sixty degrees, drops nine thousand vertical feet, and sits mostly in the category where a fall kills you. In spring there is too little snow to ski it. After the monsoon there is too much, and the avalanches make an attempt suicidal. Morrison and Nelson worked out that a narrow window might open before winter, once the slides had stopped and the surface had firmed. 3
One person had tried the descent. In 2002 the snowboarder Marco Siffredi dropped into the Hornbein and disappeared; his body was never found. The Hornbein has stayed unskied since. 3
Morrison is fifty-one, a professional skier and a builder of luxury houses around Lake Tahoe; he reckons he has put up about a hundred of them. He was born in Pittsburgh, raised in Walnut Creek, and taught himself to climb on Mount Diablo with his own rope and equipment. Paumgarten met him in Puerto Rico in 2018, at a North Face retreat for sponsored athletes, where Morrison asked whether he wanted to hear his story. 3
The story was a plane crash. Morrison's wife, Katie, and their children, Wyatt, seven, and Hannah, five, were flying from Long Beach to Henderson, Nevada, to visit a friend when a bad pocket of air over the desert brought the plane down. He was at home in Truckee. The coroner discouraged him from viewing the remains. 3
What he found on a hike soon afterwards was that hard exertion went well with tears: the endorphins changed the intensity of the grief into something closer to exultation. He went back to the mountains with more appetite than before. He met Hilaree Nelson on Makalu in 2015, and they became lovers and expedition partners. Together they made the first ski descent of the Lhotse Couloir, the line climbers call the Dream Line. 3
In 2022, rehearsing for Everest on Manaslu with cameras rolling, Nelson was caught by an avalanche two turns into a run and carried over the mountainside. Morrison and his Sherpa companions searched the debris field until they found her. He has described digging her out, holding her, and knowing as clearly as he has known anything that she was no longer there. He had her cremated in Kathmandu, at a Buddhist temple. 3
Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi had been filming the couple for a documentary. The footage became "Everest: The Other Side," which opens this week, with Morrison attempting the descent across three years after Nelson's death. The Hollywood Reporter called it "a portrait of two reckless, ruthlessly self-involved people" when it screened at Telluride. The review objected to the "stunts" as callous, given that Nelson left two children. 3
Paumgarten lets that review stand and answers it with particulars. Chin's line is that there is a cost to not taking risks, too: you can sit on your couch and eat chips until you have a coronary. Paumgarten notes that a quarter of Morrison's cohort is dead, and that the athletes who made mountain towns glamorous are also the reason the log mansions and heated driveways arrived. Morrison has worked both ends of that, sponsoring and selling. 3
The last scene is at a crag above Tahoe, four years to the day after Nelson died. "It's Hil Day," Morrison says, and gets on a 5.12b called Jazz Hands. Paumgarten finds the last vial of her ashes in the pocket of a down jacket Morrison lent him, and Morrison scatters them at the base of the route without ceremony. 3
Why this one: The film opens this week, so the summit photographs will be everywhere by Friday. The piece is worth the time for what surrounds them: how a man rebuilt a life on the activity that killed his partner, what his friends say to each other about it, and a writer who prints the hostile review rather than arguing with it.
4. Would you pay to have the 'best baby'?
- Publication: The Guardian (The Long Read)
- Author: Jan Grue
- Date: October 27, 2026
- Estimated read: About 15 minutes (3,682 words)
- Original: Read the long read
Jan Grue was born in 1981, and by the age of three he had a diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy. He used a wheelchair for longer distances from eight, and rarely walked outdoors after eighteen. For most of that time he kept a picture of a double: himself, with one error in his genome corrected. 4
Last year he saw the advertisements. Nucleus Genomics bought posters across the New York subway promising parents their "best baby," with the claims that height is eighty per cent genetic and intelligence fifty per cent. The company sells an IVF procedure that screens up to twenty embryos for genetic disorders, and also for eye and hair colour, strength, longevity, insomnia and male-pattern baldness. Its website offers "generational health." 4
Bioethicists have a name for the version on sale here. Nicholas Agar and Julian Savulescu argue for liberal eugenics, driven by parental choice rather than state coercion, and presented as the opposite of the sterilisation programmes of the twentieth century. The historian Nathaniel Comfort dates the shift from population to individual to the middle of that century, when medical genetics began producing real predictive power. 4
Grue handles the posters' numbers carefully. A heritability estimate describes how much of the variation within a population comes from genes. It says nothing about how tall or how clever one particular child will be, and the estimates are contested among geneticists anyway. Applying a population statistic to a single embryo is a category error that happens to be excellent marketing. 4
The word is older than the company. Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, coined eugenics in 1883 and described it in 1904 as what nature does "blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly," done by man "providently, quickly, and kindly." The Second International Congress of Eugenics, in New York in 1921, displayed a tree whose roots were labelled with the sciences and whose motto was that eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution. 4
Adam Rutherford's point, which Grue borrows, is that you cannot select for something without selecting against something else. Liberal eugenics prefers to dwell on enhancement, and the ideal it selects towards looks a great deal like the ideal worker: smart, efficient, unlikely ever to take a sick day. Down syndrome is a live example. In Denmark, more than 95 per cent of pregnancies in which it is identified end in termination. 4
Then the ground moved under Grue's own diagnosis. When a genetic test for spinal muscular atrophy became available, his came back negative. He has an even rarer condition, and one less likely to attract research money. A treatment for the disease he thought he had does exist — nusinersen, developed about a decade ago. Some studies suggest it can counteract the symptoms if given early enough, and arrest the progression in adults. It arrived just as he learned that it was not for him. 4
He reports what that felt like without converting it into a lesson. There was grief, and relief, and an unfamiliar sense that his life was now his own. He says plainly that he would take a cure if one existed, and that none will arrive in time for him. 4
The argument turns on where the effort goes. Disability, Grue grants, is a predicament — Tom Shakespeare's word — with real limitation and pain. He does not pretend otherwise. Much of what disables a person is also the world: being unable to walk matters far more in a town without ramps than in one with them. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the resulting position a case for conserving disability. Hannah Arendt supplies the frame he ends on, with plurality and natality: each new person brings something nobody could have specified in advance. 4
The conclusion is a single sentence aimed at policy rather than at parents: direct the effort towards making better societies rather than better people. 4
Why this one: Writing about heritable selection is usually written by people the argument is not about, which is why it tends to arrive as either advocacy or alarm. Grue is inside it. He wanted the cure, he did not get it, he says he still would take it, and he uses the whole of that experience to argue about institutions rather than about anyone's private choice.
5. 'A Doubt That Takes Easily'
- Publication: The New York Review of Books
- Author: Ursula Lindsey
- Date: October 29, 2026
- Estimated read: About 13 minutes (about 3,250 words)
- Original: Read the essay
On September 21, C'était ça ou mourir, a first novel by the Haitian-Québécois writer Thélyson Orélien, won the Prix du Roman Fnac. The book is an account of a Haitian migrant's journey north; it was on the best-seller lists, nominated for the country's major prizes and sold to publishers in more than twenty languages. The same day, an anonymous account called Balance ton Claude — "Out your Claude" — posted that it had run sections of the novel through an AI-detection program called Pangram and found widespread use of AI. 5
The Goncourt withdrew the book from consideration. Right-wing accounts attacked Orélien with racist invective. La Presse in Quebec went through his earlier journalism and found plagiarism in columns and a short story from a decade before. 5
On October 13 he broke his silence. He called the accusation "a calumny and a heresy," apologised for the old plagiarisms as youthful mistakes, and acknowledged that he had used AI for research. He said the first draft was written in 2017 and drew on things he had lived or heard. To credit a machine with the book, he wrote, was to contest his identity as a writer and his humanity. On October 21 his Canadian publisher ended the relationship. 5
Two of the men behind the account have since come forward: Pierre-Thomas Eckert, a researcher in moral philosophy, and Samuel Fitoussi, a venture-capital manager who writes for Le Figaro. In Le Monde they described AI as an existential danger to literature and research, and said their aim was to protect the trust between writers and readers. 5
The racial question is where the piece becomes an argument rather than a report. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, who won the Goncourt in 2021, wrote that there is a tradition here: "a doubt that takes easily when the writer who is its object is Black." Lindsey assembles the pattern. Yambo Ouologuem's career ended after a plagiarism scandal in 1968. Jason Arday resigned a Cambridge professorship under a plagiarism campaign and killed himself soon afterwards. Jamir Nazir and Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza, both prize-winning Black writers, have faced AI accusations in the past year. 5
The comparison running the other way is Kamel Daoud, who won the Goncourt in 2024 for Houris. A woman who survived a massacre and lost the use of her voice has sued him in Algeria and France, saying he used details of her life that she disclosed in therapy after she refused to let him write her story. French literary opinion largely closed ranks around him. 5
The debate has widened well past one book. Monique Canto-Sperber, a philosopher, argued in Le Monde for labelling AI-written books, and European Union rules due next year will require digital markers on generated text. The literature professor William Marx put the dispute in a longer frame: the author as original creator is an idea that crystallised in the eighteenth century, and Alexandre Dumas ran a workshop of uncredited assistants, called prête-plumes, or worse. 5
Lindsey then does what almost nobody in the argument did, which is read the novel. She cannot say whether AI helped write it; she noticed repetitions, and the sets of three that detection software flags. Her harder judgments are literary. The prose blankets everything in "a soft layer of banal and sometimes nonsensical poeticization"; every stranger the narrator meets speaks in aphorism; a mother with two children roped to her explains that this way, if one dies, she will not have to look for the other. 5
Her conclusion lands on the publishers. Their failure, she writes, was less a failure to detect AI than a failure of judgment: they were "blinded by the marketability of the author's biography, identity, and subject matter," and promoted as groundbreaking a novel that is sentimental and safe. It is a sharper charge than the one the anonymous account made. 5
What stays open is the question the scandal opened. The science fiction writer Alain Damasio calls AI's capacity to make us doubt human expressiveness the "ultimate narcissistic wound." Sarr's answer to the detection software is the most quotable line in the piece: to hand the judgement over to it is to make AI "not just a referee but a god who will decide what is human and not-human." 5
Why this one: By next month everyone will have an opinion about AI and the novel. Most of those opinions will be formed without reading either the book or the detection report. Lindsey reads both, quotes the disputed prose at length, and separates three questions that the coverage has merged: whether the accusation was fair, whether the software can know, and whether the book is any good.
How to spend the week
On a commute, take Ursula Lindsey. Thirteen minutes, and you will have something more useful to say about the AI novel scandal than that it happened.
On a quiet morning, take Jan Grue. Fifteen minutes, and the argument about embryo selection made by one of the people the argument is usually about.
For an evening, take Nick Paumgarten. Twenty-two minutes, and the best writing of the week: a profile of grief that never asks you to admire the summit.
With a longer evening, take Lauren Collins. Twenty-nine minutes, and a portrait of an embassy run as a family franchise, with the French on the receiving end.
Save D. T. Max for a free afternoon. Thirty-three minutes, and the fullest account you will read this month of what a clinic owes the patients who die in it.
Five publications on this list produced nothing that could be included in a window ending November 1. The New York Times Magazine's pages are metered, and its section index showed nothing newer than October 25. Harper's dates its November essays to the issue rather than to a day, which puts them outside a seven-day window. The Atlantic's November features went online earlier: Sarah Zhang's anesthesia investigation on October 5, a Tom Junod dispatch on October 9. The London Review's next issue, Vol. 48 No. 20, is dated November 5. New York Magazine published short daily pieces in these seven days.
References
- 1
- 2Charles Kushner and the MAGA Ambassador's Playbook\
newyorker.com
- 3
- 4Would you pay to have the 'best baby'?\
theguardian.com
- 5'A Doubt That Takes Easily'\
nybooks.com
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