When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation: The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer […]
Longreads
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[Fiction, not single-page] Life as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Force, and a trip to the tear-gas tent: “Do you love the army?” my commander asks. “Yes and no, I mean I definitely believe that it is important in a country like ours to serve in the army, but I hope for peace, and […]
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The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches: The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, The Atlantic, The Texas Observer, n+1, Guernica, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Marcus Sortijas. Photo: Wikipedia
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A couple’s personal experience dealing with Texas’s new sonogram law, which requires a woman to have a sonogram and hear a doctor describe her child before moving forward with an abortion: “I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want […]
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The Atavist: Reading List for Monday's Event
atavist: Don’t miss our New America NYC event “From Science to Obsession” on Monday, March 19, featuring Joe Kloc, Jay Kirk, Amy Harmon, and John Rennie. Here’s a reading list with some great stories by our panelists: Joe Kloc, The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks Jay Kirk, Burning Man Amy Harmon, Navigating Love and […]
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Learning how to code, and searching for a legendary figure in the Ruby who mysteriously disappeared: Hackety Hack solved the “Little Coder’s Predicament”: It was fun enough to engage a kid, and smart enough to teach her something to boot. But just a few months after launching it, to the astonishment of the community of […]
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A family, convinced that homeownership was a requisite part of the American dream, ends up with a foreclosure: We tried to short sale. A realtor named Sharon came by the condo to see the property and talk about our options. Normally a friendly and exuberant child, our two-year-old daughter Amelie was immediately suspicious of Sharon, […]
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A writer visits a fifth grade classroom at a northern California elementary school, where she observes the class’s anti-bullying curriculum: “Stop it, you are bullying me,” he says. Then he lets his body go slack. He bows, then sits down. “You labeled it, you said ‘stop,’ you stood up straight,” Linda says, “Good job.” “Very […]
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In 1908, teams from four countries — the United States, France, Germany, and Italy — raced from New York to Paris by driving across the American west, and the frozen Bering Strait: The contestants represented an international roster of personalities. G. Bourcier de St. Chaffray, driving the French De Dion, once organized a motorboat race […]