Longreads

An investigation into the underworld of labor brokers or "raiteros" in Chicago, who are used by some of the nation's largest temp agencies and charge temp workers significant fees:

"The system provides just-in-time labor at the lowest possible cost to large companies — but also effectively pushes workers' pay far below the minimum wage.

"Temp agencies use similar van networks in other labor markets. But in Chicago's Little Village, the largest Mexican community in the Midwest, the raiteros have melded with temp agencies and their corporate clients in a way that might be unparalleled anywhere in America — and could violate Illinois' wage laws.

"The raiteros don't just transport workers. They also recruit them, decide who works and who doesn't, and distribute paychecks."

In 1982, 250 men, women and children were massacred in the village of Dos Erres in Guatemala. Two little boys were spared, and were the keys to an investigation into the coverup and subsequent fallout:

"In the summer of 2000, Oscar was living near Boston when he received a perplexing letter.

"A cousin in Zacapa sent him a copy of an article published in a Guatemala City newspaper. It described Romero's search for two young boys who had survived the massacre and had been raised by military families.

"'AG Looks for Abducted of Dos Erres,' the headline declared. 'They Survived The Massacre.'

"The story went on to explain that prosecutors had identified both young men. Prosecutors believed that one of them, Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, was living somewhere in the United States. It was quite possible that he had been too young to remember anything about the massacre or his abduction by the lieutenant, the prosecutors said.

"The newspaper ran a family photo showing Oscar as an 8-year-old."

Nearly three miles above the rugged hills of central Afghanistan, American eyes silently tracked two SUVs and a pickup truck as they snaked down a dirt road in the pre-dawn darkness. The vehicles, packed with people, were 3 1/2 miles from a dozen U.S. special operations soldiers, who had been dropped into the area hours earlier to root out insurgents. The convoy was closing in on them.

Google's Ads Preferences believes I'm a guy interested in politics, Asian food, perfume, celebrity gossip, animated movies and crime but who doesn't care about "books & literature" or "people & society." (So not true.) Yahoo! has me down as a 36-to-45-year-old male who uses a Mac computer and likes hockey, rap, rock, parenting, recipes, clothes and beauty products; it also thinks I live in New York, even though I moved to Los Angeles more than six years ago. Alliance Data, an enormous data-marketing firm in Texas, knows that I'm a 39-year-old college-educated Jewish male who takes in at least $125,000 a year, makes most of his purchases online and spends an average of only $25 per item. Specifically, it knows that on Jan. 24, 2004, I spent $46 on "low-ticket gifts and merchandise" and that on Oct. 10, 2010, I spent $180 on intimate apparel.

Georgeanne Mumm’s surgeon emerged from the operating room with welcome news for her worried family. He had removed her cancerous kidney, he said, and her outlook looked good. The surgeon failed to mention, however, that he also had accidentally removed part of her pancreas, having mistaken it for a tumor. Nor did he mention that he had in-advertently cut the blood flow to her spleen, damaging it irrevocably. Only an emergency operation by another doctor the next day kept Georgeanne from dying right then and there.

A change to the Social Security Act granted comprehensive coverage under Medicare to virtually anyone diagnosed with kidney failure, regardless of age or income. Taxpayers now spend more than $20 billion a year to care for those on dialysis -- about $77,000 per patient, more, by some accounts, than any other nation. Yet the United States continues to have one of the industrialized world's highest mortality rates for dialysis care. Even taking into account differences in patient characteristics, studies suggest that if our system performed as well as Italy's, or France's, or Japan's, thousands fewer patients would die each year.