Rachel Aviv

Feb 10, 2025 | newyorker.com | Rachel Aviv

As Janet Malcolm worked on “Trouble in the Archives,” a two-part piece about prominent psychoanalysts who disagreed about Freud, she began a correspondence with Kurt Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives. Perhaps no journalist has ever been so attentive to the emotional dynamics in the encounter between writer and subject, the transferences that obscure our ability to take in the reality of a relationship.

Dec 23, 2024 | newyorker.com | Rachel Aviv

“I am a writer or used to be a writer,” Alice Munro wrote in 2014, in one of the last stories she tried to compose. A year earlier, she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But she had Alzheimer’s and had been in decline for several years. Her partner of four decades, Gerald (Gerry) Fremlin, had recently died, and she was living near her daughter Jenny, in Port Hope, east of Toronto.

May 20, 2024 | web.archive.org | Rachel Aviv

The case galvanized the British government. The Health Secretary immediately announced an inquiry to examine how Letby’s hospital had failed to protect babies. After Letby refused to attend her sentencing hearing, the Justice Secretary said that he’d work to change the law so that defendants would be required to go to court to be sentenced.

May 20, 2024 | web.archive.org | Rachel Aviv

The case galvanized the British government. The Health Secretary immediately announced an inquiry to examine how Letby’s hospital had failed to protect babies. After Letby refused to attend her sentencing hearing, the Justice Secretary said that he’d work to change the law so that defendants would be required to go to court to be sentenced.

May 13, 2024 | newyorker.com | Rachel Aviv

Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The collective acceptance of her guilt was absolute.