How One Man Escaped from a North Korean Prison Camp

Shin In Geun was born into Camp 14, a prison for political enemies of North Korea. His first memories were of executions, and he had come to hate the parents that gave birth to him knowing that their son would also remain a prisoner:

“The guards taught the children they were prisoners because of the ‘sins’ of their parents but that they could ‘wash away’ their inherent sinfulness by working hard, obeying the guards and informing on their parents.

“One day, Shin joined his mother at work, planting rice. When she fell behind, a guard made her kneel in the hot sun with her arms in the air until she passed out. Shin did not know what to say to her, so he said nothing.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Mar 16, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,117 words)

CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split

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 for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.

“‘[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,’ wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. ‘As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.’ And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. ‘[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.'”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Mar 13, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,163 words)

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

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. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks ‘basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.’ Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. ‘A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,’ she says, ‘incredibly intimate, personal conversations.’ Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. ‘It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,’ she says.”

Source: Wired
Published: Mar 15, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,387 words)

The Sound of All Girls Screaming

[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 on a personal level, of course, boot camp presents its own hardships, and also—’

“‘Enough,’ my boot-camp commander says.

“‘Are you afraid to die?’ she asks. She skips two questions. She knows I am trouble, although I have barely caused any yet. Maybe trouble isn’t something you do, it’s something you are.”

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Nov 2, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,276 words)

‘We Have No Choice’: One Woman’s Ordeal with Texas’ New Sonogram Law

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 another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,’ I said, ‘I can’t take any more pain.’ I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.”

Source: Texas Observer
Published: Mar 15, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,256 words)

Where’s _why?

Learning how to code, and searching for a legendary figure in the Ruby programming community 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 Ruby programmers who treated him with something approaching messianic worship, _why vanished.

“On Aug. 19, 2009, his personal site stopped loading. He stopped answering email. A public repository of his code disappeared. His Twitter account—gone. Hackety Hack—gone. Dozens of other projects—gone.”

Source: Slate
Published: Mar 15, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,873 words)

The Unnamed

[Not single-page] A lawyer can’t stop walking:

“He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse — too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He’d look up, surprised again — not just by the darkened office. By his re-entry into the physical world. Self-awareness. Himself as something more than mind thinking. He’d have to stand, a little amused by the crude technology, and wave his arms around, jump up and down, walk over and fan the door, sometimes all three, before the lights would return.

“That was happiness.”

Source: Granta
Published: Dec 1, 2009
Length: 23 minutes (5,833 words)

Housed

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, who was actually quite kind and warm, and so naively optimistic about our short sale chances that we should have realized it wouldn’t work. When Sharon tried to sit on our sofa, Amelie pointed out that it was her sofa. Our daughter had never before looked at anyone with such contempt. We asked Amelie to be nice to our guest. Matt suggested that he and Amelie take a walk to leave me time alone to talk to Sharon and show her the condo. Instead, our daughter glared at Sharon, gripped her tiny hands on the sofa, and declared to all three of us: ‘This is MY HOME.'”

Author: Aimee Phan
Published: Mar 15, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,008 words)

How to Bully Children

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 good,’ Efrain asks. ‘Any questions?’

“‘Yeah,’ someone shouts. ‘What do you do if someone calls you a hobo?’

“‘Is that a serious question?’

“‘Yes, I want to know what to do if someone calls me a hobo.’ A pause as Efrain looks very mildly annoyed. ‘Okay. It’s not a serious question.’

“‘Hobo,’ someone shouts.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 13, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,247 words)

Paris or Bust: The Great New York-to-Paris Auto Race of 1908

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 from Marseille to Algiers that resulted in every single boat sinking in the Mediterranean. His captain was Hans Hendrick Hansen, a swashbuckling Norwegian who claimed to have sailed a Viking ship, solo, to the North Pole. He declared that he and his companions would reach Paris or ‘our bodies will be found inside the car.’ Frenchman Charles Godard, driving the Moto-Bloc, participated in the Peking-to-Paris race without having driven a car and set an endurance record by driving singlehandedly for 24 hours nonstop.”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Mar 7, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,025 words)