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On the dying art of Weir fishing in Maine:

When Foster rebuilt the Money Cove weir in 2002, he talked with an old-timer named Bill Blass, who had fished the weir for years, about the cove’s rocky bottom, the contours of that bottom, the tidal patterns, and the arrival of phosphorescent organisms. During the “August darks,” when the tides are on and running hard, phosphorescent organisms can light up, or “fire,” weirs, almost like daylight. Light provides a good example of the enigmatic nature of herring. While they flee the electric lights onboard purse seiners, so the boats fish in darkness, as the day dims toward twilight, herring tend to migrate upward to feed near the surface, sometimes chasing luminescent organisms. (When you gut fish in the dark, you can find tiny glowing orbs in their stomachs.) In the late 19th century, dorymen exploited this behavior by lighting birchbark and kerosene torches over their bows and scooping the fish out of the water. One night when they were in their teens, Foster’s sons Carter and Justin collected wood along the beach and lit a huge bonfire under the high cliffs near their dad’s weir. The following day, the Fosters hauled in the biggest bunch of herring they had ever seen.

“Weir Fishing for the Last Sardine Cannery in North America.” — Peter Smith, The Art of Eating

How the upcoming Mexican presidential election could impact the drug war in cities like Guadalajara:

Weary of pantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bust—the ‘historic’ meth-lab raid in Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars’ worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really worth that much? Well, no. The more experts I consulted, the lower the number sank. Maybe it was a billion, if the meth was pure. Then was it really fifteen tons of ‘pure meth.’ as widely reported? Well, no. There had been some confusion. There were precursor chemicals. A lot of equipment—gas tanks, reactors. Maybe it was eleven pounds of pure meth. Eleven pounds? Nobody wanted to speak on the record, but the spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Guadalajara, a young man named Ulises Enríquez Camacho, finally said, ‘Yes, five kilos.’ Eleven pounds. The fifteen tons had been methamphetamine ready for packing, according to the Army. But it was not ‘a finished product,’ and there had been only five kilos of crystal. In the U.S., where meth is often sold by the gram, that amount might be worth five hundred thousand dollars. So the reported value had been inflated by a factor of eight thousand?

“The Kingpins.” — William Finnegan, The New Yorker

More by Finnegan

A baptist minister in a small Southern town learns acceptance and leans on his faith after his gay son dies of AIDS:

In the meantime, word spread from the AIDS outreach organizations across the Chattanooga area that a minister’s son had caught the virus, and the Nevelses were asked to speak at an evening service at First Baptist in the Golden Gateway. It was considered a watershed moment, because few parents were willing to talk about the infection at the time.

It would be Matt’s first plea with a church to alter its thinking.

‘All have sinned,’ he said.

‘We have got to quit trying to play God.’

“A Tempest in My Soul.” — Joan Garrett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

More from Garrett

It’s still remembered as “That Night”—when bowler Bill Fong stunned the crowd at the Plano Super Bowl:

Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a ‘perfect series.’ More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track.

Bill Fong’s run at perfection started as most of his nights do, with practice at around 5:30 pm. He bowls in four active leagues and he rolls at least 20 games a week, every week. That night, January 18, 2010, he wanted to focus on his timing.

“The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever.” — Michael J. Mooney, D Magazine

More from Mooney

The Occupy movement is trying to figure out its future, and keep the momentum going:

But Ross, too, soon found himself enchanted by the possibility of the movement. A trained economist, he decided to start an Alternative Banking working group, with the ambitious plan of setting up an Occupy Bank – built on a cooperative, credit-union model, but operating nationwide. ‘There’s a big Hyde Street retailer in Britain with huge profits, all shared amongst its workers,’ Ross notes. ‘Everyone gets eight weeks holiday a year, wonderful pension plans. But culturally, we’ve been told there’s only one model of a company, which is purely profit-driven, where the workers get paid the least possible. In fact, that’s not the best model for a sustainable economy, and there’s some evidence that shows if you treat your workers better and pay them more, particularly if you give them a stake, then they will perform better. It’s kind of obvious.’

What’s also obvious is that this phase of Occupy, with talk of credit unions and occupying the SEC, while eminently worthy, is also kind of boring, especially when compared to the thrill of Occupy’s park phase. Some, though, are ready to move on. ‘It’s easy to go back to the park occupation and fetishize it, in a way,’ says Occupy Chicago’s Brian Bean. ‘I prefer not to run a mini-society – I want to run society.’

“The Battle for the Soul of Occupy Wall Street.” — Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone

More from Binelli

On the history of the American Dream, and how it stands in the U.S. today:

The government’s verdict: ‘It is more difficult now than in the past for many people to achieve middle-class status because prices for certain key goods — health care, college and housing — have gone up faster than income.’ Median household income has also remained stagnant for more than a decade; when the figures are adjusted for inflation, Americans are making less now than they were when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

There, in brief, is the crisis of our time. The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much. Emerson once remarked that there is properly no history, only biography. This is the biography of an idea, one that made America great. Whether that idea has much of a future is the question facing Americans now.

“Keeping the Dream Alive.” — Jon Meacham, Time

More Meacham

A daughter recounts the difficult experience of getting her bipolar father the help he needed to get better:

I could feel everyone getting tired. The emergency-screening service kept sending the same patient to the psychiatric hospital, only to see him again the following week. The hospital had to baby-sit for a man who refused to comply with treatment. I made dozens of phone calls and was getting nowhere. The only people who hadn’t succumbed to fatigue were my mother, though her fingers were cramped from praying so many rosaries, and the local police, who had no choice in the matter. The same roster of officers responded to each call, shepherding my father from the street to the emergency room to PESS to jail, and periodically driving past my mother’s house to make sure things were calm. I worried that before long they, too, would give up and release my father, on his own recognizance, to the street.

And then what?

I imagined him circling a drain, the pull of love and obligation dragging my mother and siblings and me behind him.

“When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind.” — Jeneen Interlandi, The New York Times Magazine

More from Interlandi

One man’s quest to reshape the online porn industry through the “.xxx” top-level domain:

The resistance to Lawley, whatever its merits, has the ring of desperation. ICM arrived at a moment of crisis for commercial porn. After enabling several boom years, the Internet has brought many smut marketers to their knees. Rampant freebies on “tube” sites have reduced global porn revenue by 50 percent since 2007, to less than $10 billion, including about $5 billion generated in the U.S. Those are rough guesses by Diane Duke, executive director of the industry’s trade group, the coyly named Free Speech Coalition. Speaking privately, some porn executives say the coalition’s revenue estimates are optimistic. In a field dominated by privately held companies, no provable statistics exist.

Setting aside moral judgments and potential social harms—we’ll get to those—it’s remarkable that Lawley is making any money at all. Especially since he had to fight for seven years, spending millions of his own dollars, to get permission for .xxx from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit regulatory body. His persistence in the face of hostile lobbying by competitors, religious conservatives, and the U.S. government suggests that if the stubborn British entrepreneur claims to have a money-spinning solution for the Great Porn Depression, he should not be underestimated.

“The New Republic of Porn.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek

More from Barrett

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, #fiction from The New York Review of Books, plus a guest pick from Eva Holland.

A murder of a young newlywed went unsolved for 23 years, until a cold case homicide unit picked up the file and found a missing clue.

Sherri’s file perplexed Francis. The crime report stated that a swab had been taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm, but it was not listed in evidence and was not among the forensic samples that had been signed out by Moritt in 1993. It apparently had been misplaced sometime earlier. Where might it be?

Francis knew well the steps in the evidence chain. Evidence recovered from the victim’s body would be held for a time in the coroner’s freezer, while the case was still active, and at some point would be gathered up and stored under the file number. What if the swab hadn’t made it from the freezer to the file? Francis called the coroner’s office. The swab was not on file, so they searched the freezers by hand.

“A Case So Cold It Was Blue.” — Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair

More from Bowden