Tom Bissell writes about David Foster Wallace.

I heard Bissell on the radio once talking about a trip he took to post-Soviet states, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. He laughed as he told how the former communist boss/ current dictator of one of them granted a holiday amnesty and emptied the prisons while he was in the country. Bissell was mugged 4 or 5 times the following days.

Like Wallace, the 41 year-old financial chief of Fannie Mae David Kellermann recently committed suicide. With suicide you can't really explain why, even though Wallace was clinically depressed and Kellermann was under enormous pressure. Others suffering in a similar manner don't do it. In medieval Europe, suicides were denied a Christian burial and superstitiously buried at crossroads with a stake through their heart. As if their heart wasn't already broken.