Longreads

The writer investigates why endangered monk seals are being killed in Hawaii:

"'This place should be crawling with monk seals!' Robinson said as we got out to explore one bluff. 'Something’s awfully wrong here. Awfully wrong.'

"Dana Rosendal, the pilot for the family’s helicopter company, was unfazed. We’d covered only a quarter of the island, he told Robinson, and we’d already seen 10 seals.

"'Dana,' Robinson cut in, 'we’ve only seen five or six, plus one lousy turtle.'

"Rosendal ticked off each sighting, then counted up his fingers. Ten, exactly.

"'Well, whoop dee do!' Robinson shot back. 'Ten seals!'"

Luis Octavio López Vega, who worked for both the Mexican military and as an informant to the DEA, is now in hiding:

"The reserved, unpretentious husband and father of three has been a fugitive ever since, on the run from his native country and abandoned by his adopted home. For more than a decade, he has carried information about the inner workings of the drug war that both governments carefully kept secret.

"The United States continues to feign ignorance about his whereabouts when pressed by Mexican officials, who still ask for assistance to find him, a federal law enforcement official said.

"The cover-up was initially led by the D.E.A., whose agents did not believe the Mexican authorities had a legitimate case against their informant. Other law enforcement agencies later went along, out of fear that the D.E.A.’s relationship with Mr. López might disrupt cooperation between the two countries on more pressing matters."

Longreads presents: A collection of stories awarded the Pulitzer, including The New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and more.

The disgraced congressman and his wife, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, attempt to piece together their lives and careers after "that fateful tweet":

"But nearly everyone who cares about Weiner says that pugilistic political persona long ago bled into his personal life and made him 'hard to take,' as his brother Jason puts it. 'I wouldn’t stand for other people saying this about him, but there was definitely a douchiness about him that I just don’t really see anymore.' His family agrees that the post-scandal Weiner, the diaper-changing Weiner, is far more likable. 'No one has been harder on him than he has been on himself,' Jason says. 'I find that refreshing, because he was always — in his political career, and it was sort of overflowing into his personal life — this completely decisive, "this is the right thing because this is what I’m doing." It’s like this circular reasoning that was kind of hubristic. He doesn’t have that anymore. The irony is that it could make him a better politician.'"

A collection of stories from Salon, Jane, The New Yorker, New York Times and more.

A school shooting in Oakland—and the suspect, a Korean immigrant—leads to questions within the Korean-American community:

“'I know this shooting had something to do with han, with hwabyung,' Chung went on. 'I feel almost guilty saying that, knowing how hurtful those words might be to other members of the Korean community. But all my training, everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve read and my own personal experiences all point to that. This guy was suffering from something that was very Korean.'"

[Not single-page] In 1966, Tim Danielson became the second American high school runner to run a mile under four minutes. Years later, Danielson is now facing murder charges for killing his third wife:

"Nguyen, an electronics engineer, said she suggested that Qi move out of Danielson’s house, telling her friend that Danielson had treated her nicely in bringing her to the United States and establishing her son in school. Make peace with him, Nguyen said she told Qi. Danielson deserved that much respect.

"About 10 days before the shooting, Qi began to pack some things, which made Danielson angry, according to Nguyen. A few days later, he put some of Qi’s belongings in storage and told her to leave. He seemed conflicted, Qi told Nguyen.

"'She couldn’t understand what he wanted,' Nguyen said."

An accomplished physicist falls in love online—and winds up in a Buenos Aires jail, accused of drug trafficking. Was he set up by the woman he fell for?

"In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. 'Are you there, honey?' They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. 'What are you doing now?'"

Nora Ephron's son Jacob on his mother's last days, and the play she was working on that helped her understand her own sickness and impending death:

"In the play my mother wrote, there’s a scene toward the end, in which McAlary, sick with cancer, goes to the Poconos to visit his friend Jim Dwyer, then a columnist at The Daily News. It’s a glorious summer day, and McAlary’s 12-year-old son, Ryan, wants to do a flip off the diving board, but he gets scared and can’t do it. So McAlary takes off his shirt, walks to the edge of the diving board and says to him: 'When you do these things, you can’t be nervous. If you think about what can go wrong, if you think about the belly flop, that’s what’ll happen.'

"And then McAlary does the flip himself and makes a perfect landing.

"It’s a metaphor, obviously, for his view about life. And I’ve come to think it might as well have been about my mother. The point is that you don’t let fear invade your psyche. Because then you might as well be dead."