Longreads

The Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden used this gear during the May 2011 raid. The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed…

“How many women really make their voices heard? I can count them on my fingers”: Fawzia Koofi, MP for Badakhshan, who plans to stand as a presidential candidate in 2014. Photograph: Farzana Wahidy…

9. The Semplica-Girl Diaries George Saunders | The New Yorker | October 8, 2012 | 35 minutes (8,979 words) A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage…

Ephron reveres classic romantic comedies: “Look at Lubitsch. It’s so daunting what he did.” Photograph by Ruven Afanador.

John Phillip Walker Lindh, my son, was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam when he was 16 years old. He has an older brother and a younger sister. John is scholarly and devout, devoted to his family, and blessed with a powerful intellect, a curious mind, and a wry sense of humour. Labelled by the American government as "Detainee 001" in the "war on terror", John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Indiana. He has been a prisoner of the American government since 1 December 2001, less than three months after the terror attacks of 9/11. #Sept11

Thus any theological critique of Playboy that focuses on its "lewdness" will misfire completely. Playboy and its less successful imitators are not "sex magazines" at all. They are basically anti-sexual. They dilute and dissipate authentic sexuality by reducing it to an accessory, by keeping it at a safe distance. It is precisely because these magazines are anti-sexual that they deserve the most searching kind of theological criticism. They foster a heretical doctrine of man, one at radical variance with the biblical view. For Playboy’s man, others—especially women—are for him. They are his leisure accessories, his playthings. For the Bible, man only becomes fully man by being for the other.

Posted Apr 15, 2011 at 10:21 AM Richard Babcock Since Richard Babcock announced his decision to step

The making of Winston Churchill