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The lead singer of Against Me!, married with a child, is now Laura Jane Grace. She speaks out about gender dysphoria, which left her uncomfortable in a male body for as long as she can remember:

In retrospect, the lyrics are almost shockingly direct: If I could have chosen I would have been born a woman / My mother once told me she would have named me Laura / I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her / One day I’d find an honest man to make my husband

“Gabel says he thought he was ‘completely outing himself’ with a lyric like that. He expected to be confronted – a part of him even craved it. But if anyone suspected anything, no one brought it up. ‘When we did that song, I was like, “What is that about?”’ says Butch Vig, who produced Against Me!’s last two albums. ‘He just kind of laughed it off. He said, “I was stoned and dreaming about what life can be.”’

“The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel.” — Josh Eells, Rolling Stone

More from Eells

How does the U.S. define what groups are terrorist organizations, and what groups are potential allies? Questions around the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK) in Iran:

The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK), is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally. The MEK is currently campaigning to be officially delisted in the US as a terrorist organisation. Once off the list it will be free to make use of its support on Capitol Hill in order to become America’s most favoured, and no doubt best funded, Iranian opposition group.

The last outfit to achieve something similar was the Iraqi National Congress, the lobby group led by Ahmed Chalabi that talked of democracy and paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq by presenting Washington with highly questionable ‘evidence’ of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaida.

“Terrorists? Us?” — Owen Bennett-Jones, London Review of Books

More from the London Review of Books

An oral history of The Wire, ten years after the show’s debut:

Michael B. Jordan (Wallace, Barksdale gang dealer): This is some real shit. It was real to the point where crackheads would come up and try to cop. I had fake money, and they would come over, and an exchange would go down. I would think they were part of the crew, and I’d make the exchange. Then security would come around and be like, ‘No! No! No!’ and break it up. I was like, ‘Oh, shit! That’s really a crack-head! I’m sorry! I’m not really a drug dealer!’

“Maxim Interrogates the Makers and Stars of The Wire.” — Marc Spitz, Maxim

More #longreads about The Wire

On the next Justin Bieber, 16-year-old Austin Mahone, and how pop stars are made:

Last October, for instance, he was in Chicago and decided to go to Millennium Park with his mom. He tweeted this information, hoping to meet a few fans who were in the area, then pulled on a gray hooded sweatshirt and a red baseball cap that said “Chicago” and strolled down the street. Nearly one thousand girls bolted into action and immediately encircled him like a swarm of bees. Local police, alarmed by the sudden mob of squealing youngsters jumping over picnic tables, swept in and extracted Austin as if he were an imperiled head of state.

Girls Love Me.” — Katy Vine, Texas Monthly

More from Texas Monthly

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Matt Might, ThePostGame, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, fiction from Roxane Gay, plus a guest pick from Mike Dang.

A father recounts his family’s quest to diagnose a rare disease in their son:

We discovered that my son inherited two different (thus-far-unique) mutations in the same gene—the NGLY1 gene—which encodes the enzyme N-glycanase 1. Consequently, he cannot make this enzyme.

My son is the only human being known to lack this enzyme. Below, I’m documenting our journey to the unlikeliest of diagnoses. This is a story about the kind of hope that only science can provide. (An open access article in The Journal of Medical Genetics contains the detailed results from ground-breaking experiment that diagnosed him.)

“Hunting Down My Son’s Killer.” — Matt Might, Gizmodo

An investigation of sports’ biggest conspiracy theories, starting with the 1985 NBA draft:

I believe in the fix. I believe in the hidden hand, that sports have a secret, redacted history. I believe that Game 6 of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals was a sham, that Spygate was a cover-up of a cover-up, that Super Bowl III was preordained,[10]that Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s heartwarming 2001 victory at Daytona was, in fact, too good to be true,[11] that Michael Jordan’s first baseball-playing retirement was anything but, that powerful forces don’t want me to write this because powerful forces don’t want you to read this. I believe that black is white, white is black,[12] the 1990 World Cup draw was rigged[13] and Sophia Loren was definitely in on the con.[14] Most of all, I believe that on June 18, 1985, inside the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City,[15] in front of Pat O’Brien and nearly 150 reporters and umpteen popping flashbulbs and an entire world utterly oblivious to the conspiracy about to take place before them in plain sight, David Joel Stern did not act alone.

Of course, I might be crazy.

“The Truth Is Out There: From The 1985 NBA Draft Lottery To The Olympics To Game-Fixing … Which Conspiracy Theory Can You Believe?” — Patrick Hruby, ThePostGame

More #sports longreads

An account of how hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in Afghanistan through a tunnel in 2011:

At 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political block was empty, the guard said. A stout 57-year-old Pashtun from Wardak Province with a neat helmet of dark hair and a matching mustache, Mayar speaks quickly and with urgency, liberally gesticulating. He wanted to know how.

‘You have to come and see,’ the guard told him. ‘There’s a hole.’

“The Great Taliban Jailbreak.” — Luke Mogelson, GQ

More from Mogelson

[Not single-page] Ten years after Ken Caminiti became the first prominent Major League Baseball player to confess to steroid use, a look at four players whose lives and careers were forever changed:

The 1994 Fort Myers Miracle, a Class A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins, included four pitchers of similar attributes. They each threw righthanded, with average velocity, and were either 23 or 24 years old and had been drafted out of four-year colleges in no higher than the fourth round. All would become good friends as they shared the torturous bus rides and even worse food through multiple rungs on the minor league ladder. All clutched the little boy’s dream of becoming a big leaguer. Only one of them made it. Only one of them used steroids. Only one of them considered taking his own life. Only one of them harbors enormous regret. The big leaguer, the juicer, the near suicide and the shamed are one and the same.

“To Cheat or Not to Cheat.” — Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated

More from Sports Illustrated

The writer becomes pen pals with an ornery old poet, Hayden Carruth:

For most of his life, the beard was cropped and average — it was an unserious beard. But by the time I met him in 2003, it was the broad, white beard of a poet in exile, grown out in his desolate corner of America, a nothing-town near Syracuse called Munnsville. ‘The kids call it Funs-ville,’ he told me. Walking into his rickety red house, I said something like, ‘What a nice house’ — to be polite. ‘Hayden tried to commit suicide in this house,’ his wife, Joe-Anne, shot out reflexively.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Hayden said, barely turning his head from the picture window. ‘Yes, you did,’ Joe-Anne shouted. She nagged him. They bickered a while. Then he raised his voice, interrupted her and settled it: ‘The pills were in the house,’ Hayden said, ‘but I did it in the car.’

“The Recluse.” — Jon Mooallem, Radio Silence

More from Mooallem