| In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, the staff writer Rachel Aviv tells the story of Arica Waters, a Black former police officer in Ohio who lost her job and was put on trial after accusing a white male colleague of sexual assault. Like the rest of Aviv’s reporting, the piece illuminates a murky corner of our world—in this case, laws governing the reporting and investigation of rape—through an extraordinary mix of deep research, revealing detail, and engrossing storytelling. The reader finishes the article with a vastly deeper understanding of its subject, but troubled by what the story has uncovered. These hallmarks of Aviv’s writing extend back to her first piece for the magazine, an article about a Catch-22 of mental illness. In “God Knows Where I Am,” from 2011, Aviv explores the case of Linda Bishop, a New Hampshire woman whose “diagnosis shifted between bipolar and schizoaffective—a mixture of schizophrenia and a mood disorder—depending on the doctor.” At various times, Bishop abandons and reunites with her daughter; squats in a vacant farmhouse; is dubbed a “homeless ‘angel’ ” by the New York Post for her self-assigned volunteer work at Ground Zero, after 9/11; and experiences paranoid delusions about her family, friends, and the government. Periods of stability, when she accepts medication, disintegrate when she rejects it. The promise of treatment for Bishop—and relief for her loved ones and community—rests on a person who is often incapable of recognizing a problem. “In balancing rights against needs,” Aviv observes, “psychiatry is stuck in a kind of moral impasse. It is the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness.” | 
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