Newsweek

“Perhaps what Will Hunting says to a pompous Harvard scholar is really true: ‘You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda’ picked up for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.’ Except, of course, an Ivy League education has become even more obscenely expensive in the 17 years since Good Will Hunting romanticized Southie autodidactism.” An examination of three books criticizing the Ivy League.

The story of an urban explorer in New York city and his decades-long fight to excavate a four-story wall of rocky debris that he believes contains the lost pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary:

Diamond is a plump, 54-year-old New Yorker with kind, sunken eyes and frazzled hair—what’s left of it. Known in the local papers as “the Tunnel King,” he is an indisputably odd and paradoxical fellow. His acquaintances describe him as “brilliant”—he is an obsessive researcher and prodigious Googler whose living room is filled with piles of books, engineering diagrams and newspaper clippings about the tunnel. But they also say he can be “paranoid” and “hyperbolic” regarding his belief that the city has conspired to keep him out of the tunnel; and that if he gets back inside, he might find the missing pages of Booth’s diary that will prove a cabal of high-ranking, pro-Confederate New York officials plotted to kill Lincoln. When asked about this latter, seemingly preposterous claim, Diamond simply replies, “They used to say the tunnel didn’t exist.”

Somaly Mam has saved countless girls in Cambodia. Does it matter that her campaign is built on a web of lies?

Mam claims to have rescued thousands of girls and women from sex trafficking, a dangerous and formidable feat. Her story becomes even more inspiring when you hear her shocking tale of being sold into sexual slavery. In 2005, she published her autobiography, The Road of Lost Innocence, which became an international best-seller. Mam was one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2009 and has over 400,000 followers on Twitter.

She has done so much for so many, does it matter that key parts of her story aren’t true? This is a story about a story—but not quite the amazing one Mam has been telling at cocktail parties in Manhattan and Beverly Hills, or on The Tyra Banks Show. Nonetheless, it’s an astonishing tale.

A generation of children, many of them young girls, fought in Liberia’s civil wars. They’re now grown up and trapped between their past and creating a future for themselves:

“After handing over her AK-47 and her RPG launcher during a disarmament drive, Mary returned to what she had known before the war: life on the streets, drugs, and prostitution.

“When Schaack, a soft-spoken Liberian social worker with the evangelical humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse, approached her in late 2003, just months after the ceasefire, Mary told her: ‘Move from here that shit. The whole day you passing around and lying to people.’ But after a while, Schaack managed to persuade Mary and eight other girls to live for nine months at a Christian mission where they received counseling as well as courses in pastry making and tie dying.”

Rick Rubin has produced some of the biggest hits of the past 30 years, from LL Cool J to Black Sabbath. He explains the secrets of the creative process:

“We worked on [the Beastie Boys’] debut album, Licensed to Ill, for a long time, two years in all, which is part of the reason the record is as good as it is. Each song really has a life of its own, because it might be a month between writing two songs. It wasn’t like ‘OK, we have six weeks to make an album.’ It was natural—the natural flow of making a really good piece of work. I can remember at one point getting a call from Mike D really upset, like, ‘What’s going on? Why isn’t our record done yet?’ I just said, ‘I don’t really have control over that. It comes when it comes.’

“NEWSWEEK: Usually young people are in a rush. Why did you feel like you could take so much time?

“From the beginning, all I’ve ever cared about is things being great. I never cared about when they were done. Because I also feel like I want the music to last forever. And once you release it, you can’t go back and fix it, so you really have to get it right. And that takes time.”

What is it about modern society that is causing suicide rates to rise? An in-depth look at the latest research, and a theory by Dr. Thomas Joiner:

“It’s a ‘clearly delineated danger zone,’ a set of three overlapping conditions that combine to create a dark alley of the soul. The conditions are tightly defined, and they overlap rarely enough to explain the relatively rare act of suicide. But what’s alarming is that each condition itself isn’t extreme or unusual, and the combined suicidal state of mind is not unfathomably psychotic. On the contrary, suicide’s Venn diagram is composed of circles we all routinely step in, or near, never realizing we are in the deadly center until it’s too late. Joiner’s conditions of suicide are the conditions of everyday life.”

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.'”

A killing in Mississippi is the first in the state to lead to a hate-crime conviction. Deryl Dedmon is going to prison for killing a 47-year-old black man, James Anderson, with his truck:

“The Dedmon case is shocking for many reasons, but none more disturbing than this belief that a churchgoing white teenager could kill a blameless African-American man he called a ‘nigger’ and not be a racist. By all legal definitions, what he did was a hate crime. And yet it also appears to have been a chillingly unacknowledged one—an extreme example of white people doing racist things while rejecting the R word itself. David Duke. George Wallace. James Watson. Michael Richards. Don Imus. The list is long and always growing, the rolls swelling in banal and not-so-banal ways. At root, all this ‘nonracism’ reflects a national confusion—now that police dogs and burning crosses are behind us—about just what a 21st-century racist is.”

What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, it’s an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hell—a soldier can’t just quit his job to get away from his abusers.

What food says about class in America. “In America,” epidemiologist Adam Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.” He points to an article in The New York Times, written by Michael Pollan, which describes a meal element by element, including “a basket of morels and porcini gathered near Mount Shasta.” “Pollan,” writes Drewnowski, “is drawing a picture of class privilege that is as acute as anything written by Edith Wharton or Henry James.”