Longreads

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. #Sept11

The World’s Greatest Cowboy had to be peeled off his barstool and carried home the night he killed a man. The next morning, in the presence of two deputies from the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department, the cowboy sat, elbows on his knees, face protected from the light of day by a latticework of fingers, and tried to remember shooting Edward Delaney. He sucked in air, and smelled burnt powder. He breathed out, and caught a whiff of high-proof mucus. He remembered nothing.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that in number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined.

TAVI SAYS: Lizzie Widdicombe profiles 14-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson in the New Yorker (9/2010). In Paris in January, after the Chanel couture show, Karl Lagerfeld…