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Inside Israel’s attempts to slow Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and whether it may ultimately take military action:

Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July 2011. One of his tasks was defense policy and strategy on Iran. When I spoke with Kroenig last week, he said: “My understanding is that the United States has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.” Kroenig went on, “My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.”

“Will Israel Attack Iran?” — Ronen Bergman, New York Times Magazine

More Bergman: “Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life.” — New York Times Magazine, Nov. 9, 2011

Capital New York covers last night’s “Behind the Longreads” event with New York magazine, and tells writer Dan P. Lee’s story about how he reported his “Travis the Menace” story:

Lee, in a striped grey-and-black hoodie and a mop of dirty blonde hair that matched his five o’clock shadow, was participating in a panel discussion convened by the longform journalism aggregator Longreads. Sitting on a riser beside fellow New York writers Jessica Pressler and Wesley Yang, as well as the magazine’s editor in chief, Adam Moss (Lee’s story editor, David Haskell, was sipping a beer on the sidelines), the former newspaper reporter gave the hundred or so assembled Longreaders the story behind the story of “Travis the Menace.”

It began when Lee saw the Nov. 11, 2009 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” during which Nash revealed her disfigured face for the first time. 

Even though the story had already been widely covered in the press, “I felt like there was still something else there,” he said. “It was the most compelling thing I had ever seen in my entire life.”

“The Story Behind the Story of ‘Travis the Menace’.” — Joe Pompeo, Capital New York

Featured Longreader: Derek Preston’s #longreads page. See his story picks from Smithsonian Magazine, London Review of Books, Tehelka, plus more.

The emotional and financial challenges in providing assisted living for parents, who are now living longer: 

Since then, Daddy’s long goodbye has drained his retirement income and life savings of more than $300,000. Where’s that money gone? Assisted living, mostly. Of course, that amount doesn’t account for his medical bills, most of which have been paid by Medicare and insurance policies that were part of his retirement. Daddy’s income—Social Security, plus monthly checks from two pensions—pays for the facility where he lives, his taxes, his life insurance policy premiums, and such incidentals as a visiting podiatrist to clip his nails.

And he has been kicked out of two hospices for not dying.

“The Long Goodbye.” — Doug Monroe, Atlanta Magazine

See also: “When Are You Dead?” — John Sanford, Stanford Medicine Magazine, March 29, 2011

Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a ‘carceral state,’ in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

“The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

See also: “A Boom Behind Bars: Private Jail Operators Profit from Illegal Immigrant Crackdown.” — Graeme Wood, Bloomber Businessweek, March 19, 2011

[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country: 

“A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ the man asked. ‘What are you doing to this country?’ The executive turned out to be an engineering consultant whom Ghonim pegged at around 50; he might have been Ghonim himself born twenty years earlier. Ghonim is both an interested listener and not great at getting out of conversations, and so he spent the flight absorbing his seatmate’s story: The older man had supported the protests at Tahrir Square and experienced ‘the epitome of happiness’ when Mubarak had been forced down on February 11. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it.

“The Lonely Battle of Wael Ghonim.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York magazine

See also: “On the Square: Were the Egyptian Protesters Right to Trust the Military?” — Wendell Steavenson, New Yorker, Feb. 21, 2011

[Not single-page] A trip to a mysterious, reclusive community in New York that’s been derided by neighboring residents for decades:

For most of its history, the residents of surrounding areas quietly judged the Oniontowners but left them alone up on the mountain. ‘Most locals know there’s no point in going up there,’ a state police investigator told me. But recently, the demographics of the region have been changing. New York City homebuyers have plowed through Westchester and Putnam into traditionally working-class Dutchess County, ever in pursuit of cheaper, more bucolic upstate idylls. And in the past few years, suburban youth have taken to venturing up to gawk at the supposedly inbred hillbillies who’ve been popularized by urban myth. In early 2008, a shaky video called ‘Oniontown Adventures’ appeared on YouTube. In it, three young jokers drive up a dirt road in an SUV at dusk, pretending like they’re reenacting a scene from Deliverance while commenting on the ‘little inbred hick village.’

“Peeling Oniontown.” — Aaron Lake Smith, VICE magazine

More VICE: “George Lois on Advertising and the Death of the Magazine Cover.” Rocco Castoro, Jan. 14, 2011

How sexual freedom began to spread in the west, and how we moved away from a society that once executed adulterers and prostitutes:

Since the dawn of history, every civilisation had punished sexual immorality. The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate with their slaves, and ordered that adulteresses be publicly disgraced, lose their goods and have their ears and noses cut off. Such severity reflected the Christian church’s view of sex as a dangerously polluting force, as well as the patriarchal commonplace that women were more lustful than men and liable to lead them astray. By the later middle ages, it was common in places such as London, Bristol and Gloucester for convicted prostitutes, bawds, fornicators and adulterers to be subjected to elaborate ritual punishments: to have their hair shaved off or to be dressed in especially degrading outfits, severely whipped, displayed in a pillory or public cage, paraded around for public humiliation and expelled for ever from the community.

“The First Sexual Revolution: Lust and Liberty in the 18th Century.” — Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Guardian

See also: “The Women’s Crusade.” — Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 17, 2009

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Outside Magazine, The New Republic, Esquire, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Prospect Magazine’s David Wolf.

Photo: moriza/Flickr

[Fiction] A marriage and its outside interferences:

When she told her husband that David Cannon had arranged for her a series of recitals in South America, she looked to him for swift response. She was confident that anything touching on her professional life would kindle his eye and warm his voice. It was, in fact, that professional life as she interpreted it with the mind of an artist, the heart of a child, which had first drawn him to her; he had often admitted as much. During one year of rare comradeship he had never failed in his consideration for her work. He would know, she felt sure, that to go on a concert tour with David Cannon, to sing David Cannon’s songs under such conditions, presented good fortune in more than one way. He would rejoice accordingly.

But his “Why, my dear, South America!” came flatly upon her announcement. It lacked the upward ring, and his eye did not kindle, his voice did not warm. He himself felt the fictitious inflection, for he added hastily, with happier effect: “It’s a wonderful chance, dearest, isn’t it?”

“The Thing They Loved.” — Marice Rutledge, The Century Magazine, 1920

See more Pen/O. Henry Award Winning #Fiction Longreads

Photo: thejourney1972/Flickr