Jonathan Rosen

Michael Laudor and Jonathan Rosen grew up across the street from each other in New Rochelle, both sons of clever fathers, both certain they were headed somewhere. Laudor went to Yale, then to a locked ward with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, then to Yale Law School, and became for a while a national story about recovery: a profile, a film deal, a book contract. In 1998 he killed Carrie Costello, his pregnant fiancee, while acutely unwell, and was found not responsible by reason of mental illness. The Best Minds, which Penguin Press published in 2023, is Rosen's account of the friendship and of what he thinks went wrong around it, including the emptying of the state hospitals and a culture that preferred the redemption narrative to the illness. It was a Pulitzer finalist in memoir the year after. Rosen edited the culture pages of the Forward for a decade and has written The Talmud and the Internet and the novel Joy Comes in the Morning.