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In Atlanta, a drug dealer is asked to become a confidential informant for cops in a narcotics unit. He ends up turning them in when the officers try to cover up a botched drug bust that ends up killing an innocent woman:

You made a buy today for us,’ Smith explained. ‘Two $25 baggies of crack.’

‘I did?’ White asked. It took him a moment to register. ‘O.K. Who did I buy it from?’

‘Dude named Sam.’ Smith described the imaginary seller, told how Sam had taken his money then walked White to the back of the house and handed him the drugs as Smith and a fellow officer, Arthur Tesler, watched from a car across the street.

‘O.K.,’ White said. ‘Where?’

Smith said: ‘933 Neal Street. I’ll call you later.’

Now in the living room, the TV reporter was saying how a 92-year-old woman had died in the incident, and people were suggesting that the police had shot her. Two and two came together in White’s mind. They did it, he suddenly knew. They messed up. They killed that old lady. Now his heart pounded as the implications became clear. And they want me to cover for them.

“A Snitch’s Dilemma.” — Ted Conover, New York Times Magazine

More #longreads about drugs

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: D Magazine, Fortune Magazine, New England Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, #fiction, plus a guest pick from James daSilva.

Finding Poetry in Illness

A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry:

I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In between, I found Swithering by Robin Robertson and through ‘Trysts’ met him on the riverbed. Ada Limón’s ‘Crush’ cut ‘the right branch / and a sort of light / woke up underneath.’ I ached for the current between Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, and the ancient liberties taken by Cavafy and Catullus. I luxuriated in the ecstatic poetry of Mirabai and mused on the grand time Jane Hirshfield and Robert Bly must have shared while making their translations. I grabbed onto Kevin Young’s shirttails for a wild ride, and I was no less than razed and rebuilt by Richard Siken’s ‘Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out’: ‘The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. / Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.’ Mary Oliver’s West Wind dazzled me with its investigation into longing, and in American Primitive I cherished Oliver’s ‘The Plum Trees,’ with its advice that ‘the only way / to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it / into the body first, like small / wild plums.’

“Finding Poetry in Illness.” — Jennifer Nix, Poetry Foundation

More from the Poetry Foundation

Meet the man who’s been standing outside the Vatican embassy for 14 years—a vigil on behalf of the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic church:

Time weighs on John Wojnowski. It wears him down. It winds him up.

Time, for Wojnowski, is not just the half century since the priest in the mountains of Italy touched him. It is also the lost days since then, the wasted months and years when he is sure he let everyone down: his parents, his wife, his children, himself.

Markers of time are there, too, in the ragged datebooks that cleave to his body like paper armor. While riding the bus late one night, after another of his vigils outside the Vatican’s United States embassy, he showed them to me: The 2010 datebook inhabits the right pocket of his frayed chinos, 2011 the left; the 2012 book, its pages bound by rubber bands, stiffens the pocket of his shirt.

He has come to this corner and stood with his signs for some 5,000 days. In his datebooks, he records—a word or two, just enough to jog memory—the sights and sounds that keep one day from bleeding into the next.

“The Passion of John Wojnowski.” — Ariel Sabar, Washingtonian

More from Washingtonian

The Girls creator remembers her friendship with Nora Ephron:

Her advice was unparalleled. At one of our lunches this past January, I was sheepishly describing a male companion’s lack of support for my professional endeavors. She nodded in a very ‘don’t be stupid’ way, as if I already knew what I had to do: ‘You can’t possibly meet someone right now. When I met Nick, I was already totally notorious’—note: Nora was the only person who could make that word sound neither braggy nor sinister—’and he understood exactly what he was getting into. You can’t meet someone until you’ve become what you’re becoming.’ Panicked, I asked, ‘How long will that take?’

Nora considered a moment. ‘Give it six months.’

“Seeing Nora Everywhere.” — Lena Dunham, New Yorker

In investigation into how the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) became accused of intentionally allowing American firearms to get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels:

Voth grew deeply frustrated. In August 2010, after the ATF in Texas confiscated 80 guns—63 of them purchased in Arizona by the Fast and Furious suspects— Voth got an e-mail from a colleague there: ‘Are you all planning to stop some of these guys any time soon? That’s a lot of guns…Are you just letting these guns walk?’

Voth responded with barely suppressed rage: ‘Have I offended you in some way? Because I am very offended by your e-mail. Define walk? Without Probable Cause and concurrence from the USAO [U.S. Attorney’s Office] it is highway robbery if we take someone’s property.’ He then recounted the situation with the unemployed suspect who had bought the sniper rifle. ‘We conducted a field interview and after calling the AUSA [assistant U.S. Attorney] he said we did not have sufficient PC [probable cause] to take the firearm so our suspect drove home with said firearm in his car…any ideas on how we could not let that firearm “walk”’?

“The Truth About the Fast and the Furious Scandal.” — Katherine Eban, Fortune

More from Fortune

A look at the rise of the hactivist group Anonymous, and why they’ve targeted certain organizations:

On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 senior hackers who made all the decisions, and he purportedly had linked their IRC handles to real names using social-network analysis. He was planning to announce all this, he said, during a presentation at an upcoming security conference.

Anonymous responded with inhuman severity and swiftness. Within 48 hours, all the data on the email servers of HBGary Federal and its former parent company, HBGary, had been stolen and then released in full on the Pirate Bay. Anons further humiliated Barr by seizing his Twitter account and (they allege, though this has never been confirmed) even erasing his iPad remotely. Barr’s Anonymous presentation was posted on the net and laughed at for its supposed inaccuracies. The notice on HBGary Federal’s site read, ‘This domain has been seized by Anonymous under section #14 of the rules of the Internet.’ (Rule 14 is a real thing, from a ‘Rules of the Internet’ list that often made the rounds on /b/. It reads as follows: ‘Do not argue with trolls—it means that they win.’)

“How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down.” — Quinn Norton, Wired

More from Wired

Nora Ephron on her uncle Hal, an inheritance, and working on a famous screenplay:

My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several trees. I ripped out the scraggly lawn and imagined the huge trucks of sod I would now be able to pay for. I considered a trip to the nursery to look at hydrangeas. My heart was racing. I pulled my husband away from his work, and we had a conversation about what kind of trees we wanted. A dogwood, definitely. A great big dogwood. It would cost a small fortune, and now we were about to have one.

I went upstairs and looked at the script I’d been writing. I would never have to work on it again. I was just doing it for the money and, face it, it was never going to get made, and, besides, it was really hard. I switched off the computer. I lay down on the bed to think about other ways to spend Uncle Hal’s money. It crossed my mind that we needed a new headboard.

Thus, in fifteen minutes, did I pass through the first two stages of inherited wealth: Glee and Sloth.

“My Life as an Heiress.” — Nora Ephron, The New Yorker (Oct. 2010)

See also: “My First New York.” New York magazine (March. 2010)

[Fiction] A husband, feeling sick, leaves his father-in-law’s party early:

At this point, the husband realizes that he doesn’t want to spend the night reading Rousseau in bed, alone. He thinks about going downstairs to the hotel bar. It’s the kind of thing he never does—but ten minutes later there he is, sitting at the bar, reading his book. The husband is not trying to pick anyone up. His wife will be back in an hour or two, and besides, who would dream of picking someone up with Rousseau? Of all the authors you could try to pick someone up with, Rousseau is probably the worst. Or maybe Kant. The husband orders a hot toddy. The bartender, an attractive young woman with crinkly black hair, brings him the drink and they exchange remarks about it. Is that what you wanted? Yes, it’s perfect, the husband says.

“Another Life.” — Paul La Farge, The New Yorker

See more #fiction

Keeper of the Flame

A father and son visit a collector of Nazi paraphernalia in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina:

My father glanced over his shoulder at me and emitted a wheeze-burst of laughter—an exhalation intended to express disbelief. He had led me to an underground vault containing the artifacts of the last century’s most brutal regime, and he now seemed downright giddy. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think or what to say. I found it difficult to process what any of this meant. That is, I didn’t know why it was here, how it had gotten from where it had been made to where it was now. Were we in the presence of some kind of monster? Or had he created this space for stuff he deemed historically significant, buried it in a moisture-controlled vault because he fancied himself one of history’s unbiased curators? Was this the product of an obsessive and sympathetic mind, one which interpreted the mainstream records of history as having been unduly cruel to the Third Reich, which had been a movement, in his eyes, about nationalism, about ancestors, about revering and honoring the past? I didn’t know. And, honestly, I was afraid to ask.

“Keeper of the Flame.” — Matthew Vollmer, New England Review

More from the New England Review