Cynthia Zarin’s Vanishing Acts in Harper’s Magazine

When did I become interested in disappearance? In November 1961, Michael Rockefeller, the son of the then governor of New York, age twenty-three, vanished in New Guinea when his catamaran capsized and he drowned while trying to swim to shore. Or did he drown? His body was never found. How could that be? A story lurking in the mind’s eye, a helicopter rotor over the river. He was a boy who loved beautiful things, and he had found them there, living among the Asmat people. 

Read full article on Harper’s