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A look at the work of Craig Venter, one of the first scientists to map the human genome. Venter’s work in synthetic biology could one day change the world by producing clean fuels and biochemicals:

Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.

“Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World.” — Wil S. Hylton, New York Times Magazine

More from Hylton

Reexamining Vonnegut’s body of work as an adult:

Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five taught me two things about the novel: how great it really is, and what it’s really about. It’s not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD. Vonnegut never explicitly negates the former possibility, but the evidence for the latter is overwhelming once you start to notice it. Billy Pilgrim, whose wartime experience closely parallels Vonnegut’s own, does not announce his abduction to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo and mated with the Earthling porn star Montana Wildhack—with the strong suggestion that he doesn’t imagine it, either—until after the plane crash that replays, in several respects, his wartime trauma. Despite the way we flesh them out in our minds into the semblance of a real story—as Vonnegut surely knew we would—the scenes on Tralfamadore add up to no more than a handful of discontinuous fragments: a moment in the flying saucer, a moment in the zoo and a few moments with Montana Wildhack, amounting altogether to scarcely ten pages. The whole scenario turns out to derive from a Kilgore Trout novel that Billy had read years before (as well as sharing plot points with The Sirens of Titan). And the compensatory nature of the wisdom Billy claims to learn up there is all too clear. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth one being time. ‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past.’

“‘I Was There’: On Kurt Vonnegut.” — William Deresiewicz, The Nation

More by Deresiewicz

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.

“Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala.” — Sebastian Rotella, Ana Arana, ProPublica, Fundación MEPI

More from ProPublica

[Not single-page] A profile of Oliver Samwer and his web copycat factory in Berlin, which specializes in building knockoff websites inspired by growing American startups—then, sometimes, them back to the original company:

The decision to copy a given business generally takes three hours to a couple of days; actually building the first version of the new company’s website takes four to six weeks. “The speed at which you can make decisions here is amazing,” says Brigitte Wittekind, a former McKinsey consultant who was recruited last year to create a clone of Birchbox, the New York start-up that offers samples of cosmetics to subscribers for $10 a month. Wittekind’s company, Glossybox, spent its first year opening websites in 20 countries. It has 400 employees and 200,000 paid subscribers—twice as many as its American counterpart—and just launched in the United States, one of the few instances in which a Rocket clone will go head to head with the company on which it is modeled.

“Global Copycats: The Sincerest Form of Flattery.” — Max Chafkin, Inc.

More from Chafkin

Inside the group’s 50th anniversary reunion tour: How the legendary group fell apart and came back together, and how Brian Wilson gets along with his old bandmates:

The vibe in Burbank is collegial, but each Beach Boy is locked into his own orbit. Wilson and Love tend to communicate through the musical directors they’ve retained from their respective touring bands; Jardine, Johnston, and Marks hover on the margins. Over lunch, Jardine tells me he’s been urging Love to open the second half of the set with ‘Our Prayer,’ the hushed choral prelude to Smile, but so far, Love has been brushing him off. ‘With him, you never know if it’s confrontational or uncomfortable because he’s able to mask any kind of negativity,’ Jardine says. ‘You never know if you’ve fucked up or not.’ When I mention ‘‘Til I Die,’ a stark Wilson solo composition from 1971, Johnston, who’s sitting nearby, insists that it was ‘the last Brian Wilson recording. Ever. The career ended for me right with that song.’ But why? ‘Because he was still 100 percent,’ Johnston explains. ‘Now, he’s … you know, a senior guy.’

“The Beach Boys’ Crazy Summer.” — Andrew Romano, Newsweek

More from Newsweek

A look at the Obama Administration’s process for approving drone strikes on Al Qaeda suspects. Insiders say President Obama is personally approving the final decisions:

President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.

‘How old are these people?’ he asked, according to two officials present. ‘If they are starting to use children,’ he said of Al Qaeda, ‘we are moving into a whole different phase.’ “It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.

“Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.” — Jo Becker, Scott Shane, The New York Times

More #longreads about Obama

Why was New York Times CEO Janet Robinson fired? A look inside the political battles and financial troubles that led Arthur ­Sulzberger to let Robinson go (with a $24 million exit package):

Interviews with more than 30 people who are intimately familiar with different aspects of the Times’ business (none but a spokesperson would speak for attribution—this is the paper of record, after all) have made it clear that Gonzalez’s rise and Robinson’s fall, and the ensuing leadership vacuum inside the paper, were symptomatic of larger forces at work. Even as a new pay wall was erected on the Times’ website last spring to charge customers for access, the company’s performance, including an alarming dive in print advertising when other media companies were beginning to recover, was faltering, and Sulzberger was under pressure both financial and familial to throw Robinson overboard. “As the paper’s stock price has declined in recent years, there has been increasing unease among the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, who control the paper through a special class of shares. Three years ago, facing huge debt problems, the company suspended the lucrative stock dividend that once flowed quarterly to the family’s 40-plus members, intensifying the need to solve the intractable advertising problems of the newspaper in the digital age and figure out a way to turn the family’s cash spigot back on. Janet Robinson, the company’s advertising brains, found herself caught between her increasingly remote boss and a frustrated family worried over the future of its 116-year-old fortune.

“A New York Times Whodunit.” — Joe Hagan, New York magazine

More #longreasds from Joe Hagan

Once an enemy of the U.S., Vietnam is growing as a country, and has become a key ally “as a counter to China’s rising power”:

Nothing better illustrates the Vietnamese desire to be a major player in the region than the country’s recent purchase of six state-of-the-art Kilo-class submarines from Russia. A Western defense expert in Hanoi tells me that the sale makes no logical sense: ‘There is going to be real sticker shock for the Vietnamese when they find out just how much it costs merely to maintain these subs.’ More important, the expert says, the Vietnamese will have to train crews to use them—a generational undertaking. ‘To counter Chinese subs,’ the expert says, ‘they would have been better off concentrating on anti-submarine warfare and littoral defense.’ Clearly, the Vietnamese bought these submarines as prestige items, to say We’re serious.

“The Vietnam Solution.” — Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic

More from Vietnam

Break All the Way Down

[Fiction] A baby’s arrival stirs up difficult memories:

I sat with the baby in the living room, setting her on a clean blanket. When I tired of watching her, I stretched out, resting my hand on her stomach. I fell asleep with the baby staring at me, her eyes wide open.

In the morning, my boyfriend kicked my foot with his heavy work boot. ‘What the fuck is this?’

I sat up quickly, holding a finger to my lips. I stood and pulled him into the bedroom. ‘Anna Lisa brought the baby last night. She can’t take care of her anymore.’

“Break All the Way Down.” — Roxane Gay, Joyland

More fiction

One of the greatest athletes of all time faded into the background while his wife and daughters became reality TV stars:

Fathers suffer a curse, and Bruce Jenner knows this curse better than most: The day you become a father, you stop being who you were. In the eyes of your children, your life began when theirs did.

The strange thing about Jenner, now that he’s sixty-two years old: It’s not just his glorious past that has disappeared. It’s as though all of him, every previous incarnation of him, has been flooded out of view: by the fame of his adopted family — his third wife, the former-and-sometimes-still Kris Kardashian, her son, Rob, and her collection of daughters, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie, the last two also Jenner’s — by the glib demands of reality-TV story lines, by dubious plastic surgery and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Even in his own home, that familiar Spanish castle with the fountain splashing out front, you have to look hard to find those few traces of his existence. (‘My mom’s house,’ Kim calls it.) All of the photographs are of the children; all of the memorabilia and props are the product of their successes, not his. There is no red singlet in a frame; his gold medal is nowhere to be found. For the most part, Bruce Jenner, Olympian, has been banished to the garage.

“The Strange Thing About Bruce Jenner.” — Chris Jones, Esquire

More from Jones