Free The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein

One of the sponsors of the research was a drug manufacturer who was trying to find the holy grail, medication that could ward off the effects of drink.
    What would the royalties look like on that patent? A pill you could take before you left the bar, diminishing the effect of whatever you’d just imbibed, refocusing your mind so you could take the wheel. A pill that would let you get crazy on the dance floor, then go to work the next day clear-eyed and levelheaded. Andy and his colleagues called it the Margaritapill. Other labs were making some headway on this—dihydromyricetin looked promising—and the drug company gave his lab millions to try to catch up. Not that Andy himself was fueled by imagined riches. His fuel came from somewhere murkier—to understand, to know what to blame.
    He was hired a year later at Exton Reed, a college he’d never heard of, on the strength of his coauthored papers, and his research was the object of some fascination during his interview. “So tell me, Andy,” said Linda Schoenmeyer, an ornithologist who’d never had anything to do with rodents. “How exactly do you give an EEG to a rat? Do you have, like, tiny little sensors? Do you have to shave their little heads?”
    How to explain? “We, you know, we insert receptors into their brains. While they’re under general anesthesia,” he said. “And then we hook the receptors up to an EEG reader. The rats don’t even notice.” This wasn’t exactly true—the rats awoke from anesthesia groggy and pissed off, with little white plugs sticking out of their bloodied heads, but there was no reason to get into the nitty-gritty on his interview.
    â€œYou stick receptors?” Linda asked. “Into their brains?”
    â€œThat is how they do it,” Marty Reuben, the botanist, said. “I’ve read about this sort of thing.”
    The biologists seemed much too dismayed for what was, in the annals of animal research, actually fairly benign intervention, but they didn’t judge him unkindly for it. They just seemed chastened by their ignorance, and apologized, when he accepted the job, that they really didn’t have the resources to conduct brain surgery on rats but perhaps they could support him in simpler research, if he was so inclined?
    A simple house, a simple life, a simple job, simple research: he was so inclined.
    â€œLaurence and I would love to have you and your wife to dinner once you get settled,” said Nina Graff.
    He hadn’t wanted to explain it to them in the interview. “Louisa was killed in a car accident last winter,” Andy said. “But thank you for your invitation.”

FIVE
    Members of the Florida Prison Parole Board:
    It is with great sadness that I write, once again, my victim impact statement regarding parole for Oliver McGee, prisoner N24633. Mr. McGee killed my wife, Louisa Waite, in a motor vehicle accident in August 2004. As you undoubtedly know, Mr. McGee’s blood alcohol content the night he drove his car into my wife’s was almost four times the legal limit; that he was able to drive the car at all seems like the darkest sort of miracle, since someone that drunk shouldn’t be able to fit a key into the ignition, much less put a car into drive. Yet there he was, nineteen years old, swerving back and forth on Eighty-seventh Street before slamming, for no reason except the perverse misfiring of the drunken brain, into the Mazda my wife was driving to McDonald’s to bring back dinner for me. Our daughters were then one and almost four.
    In previous letters I have prevailed upon you to keep Mr. McGee locked up as a preventive measure, a way to keep a killer behind bars for the protection of society, the logic being (logic that’s been borne out by my own professional studies into alcoholism) that once a drunk always a drunk—or, to be more politic about it, the logic being that alcoholism is a