The Empathy Punishment
A woman hurled a burrito bowl at a Chipotle employee. Then a judge made her walk in the victim’s shoes.
Late last year, an editor at New York magazine suggested that I look into the story of Rosemary Hayne, a woman in Ohio who threw her burrito bowl at a Chipotle employee in a fit of rage and was subsequently sentenced to…work two months in a fast food restaurant:
The story had a lot to unpack. For one, why did it feel like the post-pandemic world was filled with so many people who had seemingly forgotten how to interact each other? And could the judge’s experimental sentence actually induce empathy? (And what, of course, made the woman get so mad—there’s a photo in the piece of the offensive burrito bowl.) I won’t spoil things for you, but suffice to say the story took turns we didn’t expect. You can read it here.
I also wrote a short profile of Religion of Sports, a sports documentary company, for Inc. magazine. The most interesting thing I found was how the company thinks that the triumphant sports documentary genre can potentially be applied to other genres of idolatry: musicians, entrepreneurs, and so on. That story is here.
Thanks for reading!