From Moscow by way of Tennessee comes this awful story of adoption failure. I’ve heard of some crazy ways of ending relationships: one of my favorite people in the world was divorced by email (no, not Theodore). People disown each other by text, I’m sure, and Skype  to say they’re never coming home. But putting your adopted 8-year-old son on a one-way flight back to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport with nothing other than a handwritten note explaining that he has psychological problems? This is insane. Vindictive. Terrible, not just for the boy, but also for the non-batshit families that want to adopt responsibly. The fallout was a pretty immediate form of collective punishment: a call by the Kremlin to freeze all adoptions to the U.S. from Russia.

That said, the challenges facing some families who adopt from Eastern European orphanages are just astounding. The best report I’ve ever come across about this was from This American Life. The episode is called Unconditional Love, but what eventually led to the remarkable taming of the nearly homicidal adopted son in the story was less love than pragmatism. It’s an incredible testimony. Listen to it.