You Can Run

(magazine.atavist.com)

91 points | by bryanrasmussen 8 hours ago ago

41 comments

  • bee_rider 5 hours ago

    Wow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up. It’s basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family.

    “You can run,” I guess maybe in the context of “You can run but you can’t hide” is not really touched upon too much. I mean it doesn’t have a particular connection to this story, any more than any other story about a fugitive.

    • chongli 15 minutes ago

      Damn, I thought this was going to be a guide to getting into running for exercise. Yes, I know there are lots of those around, but if this one made the front page of HN then maybe it had something interesting about it, or it was particularly well written or something.

    • muglug 4 hours ago

      Yeah — but includes a fun cameo from a famous 90s TV dad.

    • jmye 2 hours ago

      Have you ever like, read books? Why on earth would you think the title of a piece needs to call to anything but a general emotion from the story?

      > Wow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up.

      Yes, they were building suspense and telling an interesting story. It's a long form article, not a 30-word tweet. Jesus.

      • JRandomHacker42 2 hours ago

        I've seen this attitude on HN all the time - the concept of "a narrative hook" is apparently a foreign concept here

        • simulator5g an hour ago

          Clickbaiters abused the concept of a hook until the hook itself was seen as clickbaity.

          • natpalmer1776 an hour ago

            Damn near a whole generation estranged from basic literary convention due to its horrendous abuse.

    • kayo_20211030 5 hours ago

      Yup. A big yawn. It seems like it ought to deep and insightful, but is, as you say, "basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family". There's no connection between the two parts that goes deeper that "they knew each other once, but did they really know each other?". It'd be Hallmark, but the parents aren't sympathetic enough.

  • ahwvd37js 2 hours ago

    In the long tradition of commenting on HN without reading the source, I was about to write up everything I've learned about running over the years...shoes, routes, stretches, rest days, IT band therapy, ...

  • declan_roberts an hour ago

    Their dad smuggled cocaine. That was the secret that took about 4,000 words to reach. Entertaining article, but boy what a trudge.

  • delichon 6 hours ago

      The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. -- Ezekiel 18:20
    
    That was aspirational around 590 BC when written, and still is. To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family.
    • password4321 5 hours ago

      You can't quote that without also quoting:

         Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. -- Exodus 34:7
      • Kaliboy an hour ago

        This is literally true now that we understand epigenetics a bit more.

        • jibal an hour ago

          lItErAlLy not remotely true

      • Exoristos 2 hours ago

        Except that the writer in Ezekiel is proposing a new deal (in the voice of God) for his intended audience: basically, if at this point in the negotiations you forsake behavior A, various criminality and oppression; I will promise B, not to hold your relatives responsible, and C, to rescue those you've oppressed. (Also possibly D and E -- it's a long passage.)

      • incr_me 3 hours ago

        Why not?

        • nkrisc 2 hours ago

          Probably to show you can pick any choose any bible verse to make whatever point you want. There’s a verse for A and NOT A.

          • Kaliboy an hour ago

            That's weird. I don't have this with the Bible. But maybe I haven't read those passages. Do you have some examples?

            • jibal an hour ago

              How is it possible to not be familiar with this common criticism? e.g., Leviticus prohibits wearing clothes woven of two different types of fabric and calls for killing adulterers, anyone who curses their parents, etc. etc. which millions of cherry pickers ignore while constantly referring to the bit about laying with a man as with a woman.

          • wizzwizz4 an hour ago

            There's a verse for "humans only have one rule: don't eat that apple" (Genesis 3:3), but the narrative in which this verse appears makes it obvious that this is no longer the case by the end of the chapter. Much of the Bible is presented as a history, and the rules presented are superseded, amended, qualified or augmented by subsequent rules throughout – although not usually so soon as this.

            This poses a problem for cherrypicking, but exactly the same problem is present when cherrypicking from any legal tradition: that doesn't mean that the law is meaningless, only that cherrypicking is not an appropriate way to read it.

          • jibal an hour ago

            But they weren't touting the bible or offering it as an authority, just saying that one particular statement was "aspirational" but has practical problems ("To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family").

      • jibal an hour ago

        Of course one can quote the statement that one agrees with and not the statement one doesn't agree with, unless the intent is to review the work that contains them, which it wasn't.

    • boothby 5 hours ago

      My favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.

      • Etheryte 5 hours ago

        They more or less did that during the bombing of London, children were evacuated to foster families in the countryside en masse. Luckily they came to terms with the fact that this was an insanely traumatic experience pretty quickly and reverted. It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.

        • trelane 2 hours ago

          > It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.

          Unless they happen to go to war themselves, vanquishing an evil queen with the help of a lion and becoming kings and queens, and reigning for a long while themselves.

          Those kids seem to mostly turn out alright. Small sample size though.

          • wizzwizz4 an hour ago

            I'm not so sure you're interpreting the data correctly: 1 in 4 such children become "silly, conceited" adults, forgetting all the lessons they learned on their adventure; and 3 in 4 develop vivid visions that result in them getting killed by a train.

        • CamouflagedKiwi 4 hours ago

          Unless the child is killed in said active war zone, which was the maximally traumatic outcome they were trying to avoid. Some evacuation was reverted, but there were also later waves; I don't think it was clear that it was overall the wrong thing given the very possible outcomes of heavier bombing or even invasion.

        • kortilla 5 hours ago

          Does this apply to babies separated at birth though?

          • moralestapia 5 hours ago

            The trauma shifts forward in time, like debt.

      • marginalia_nu 2 hours ago

        Amusing how many read excerpts of The Republic and come away thinking it's a utopian project, and not a thought experiment to investigate the nature of justice.

    • lazyasciiart 5 hours ago

      And as many adoptive parents know, that doesn’t go so easily.

  • tobyhinloopen 3 hours ago

    I expected a “running for beginners” app hah, like for training / endurance

  • twobitshifter 2 hours ago

    I read it all. There are no shockers in the boxes. It's all explained ahead of time and by the time the contents of the boxes are revealed, you'll wish you didn't read all of that.

  • dyauspitr 43 minutes ago

    Ah to live in the 70s and 80s where nothing was verifiable. I probably would still have been a model employee but the possibilities were endless.

  • RickJWagner 3 hours ago

    Car racing and drug running must have been closely linked in the 80s. For another great read about them, check out Randy Lanier’s story. ( He had racing boats, too. )

    Maybe Miami Vice was closer to truth than we knew.

  • bflesch 35 minutes ago

    Is this a story from the Epstein universe? Because the town of York during that time had some interesting characters like Donald and Kashoggi. Also "Lago Mar" in Florida sounds familiar.

  • davidw 4 hours ago

    On the subject of crime and that web site, I thought this story was quite fascinating:

    https://magazine.atavist.com/2019/outlaw-country-klamath-cou...

    There are a lot of those bits of land throughout the west that have been, for whatever reason, subdivided enough to make them very cheap plots of land in remote areas. They tend to attract a lot of very random people.

    There's an area like that near where I live in Bend, Oregon where some guy called in to the Sheriff's department worried about his brother. The deputies decided to visit the next day because it was winter and already dark. Reading that, I had a record scratch moment where I was going "wait, the sheriff's deputy wouldn't visit the area after dark - holy crap".

  • dyauspitr an hour ago

    > John was strict and controlling. He wanted his daughters to dress in identical clothing embroidered with their initials, and told them to wear their hair long, that it looked more ladylike than a popular bob cut. He wrote down chores for everyone in the family on sheets of yellow legal paper. Erin and Meredith got lists of books to read and words to memorize. The house had about a dozen phones, and John instructed Erin to answer formally: “McCann residence, Erin speaking. How may I help you?” John told his daughters that there was only one right way to install a new roll of toilet paper—feeding forward from the top, not hanging down in back—and insisted that they get straight A’s while lying about his academic achievements.

    So completely normal things painted as some insidious nonsense.

    • djeastm 19 minutes ago

      I wouldn't call that completely normal. It's certainly strict and controlling.

  • wwarner 3 hours ago

    Honestly i come to hn to escape true crime.