A Snitch’s Dilemma
In Atlanta, a drug dealer is asked to become a confidential informant for cops in a narcotics unit. He ends up turning them in when the officers try to cover up a botched drug bust that ends up killing an innocent woman:
“‘You made a buy today for us,’ Smith explained. ‘Two $25 baggies of crack.’
“‘I did?’ White asked. It took him a moment to register. ‘O.K. Who did I buy it from?’
“‘Dude named Sam.’ Smith described the imaginary seller, told how Sam had taken his money then walked White to the back of the house and handed him the drugs as Smith and a fellow officer, Arthur Tesler, watched from a car across the street.
“‘O.K.,’ White said. ‘Where?’
“Smith said: ‘933 Neal Street. I’ll call you later.’
“Now in the living room, the TV reporter was saying how a 92-year-old woman had died in the incident, and people were suggesting that the police had shot her. Two and two came together in White’s mind. They did it, he suddenly knew. They messed up. They killed that old lady. Now his heart pounded as the implications became clear. And they want me to cover for them.“
When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind
A daughter recounts the difficult experience of getting her bipolar father the help he needed to get better:
“I could feel everyone getting tired. The emergency-screening service kept sending the same patient to the psychiatric hospital, only to see him again the following week. The hospital had to baby-sit for a man who refused to comply with treatment. I made dozens of phone calls and was getting nowhere. The only people who hadn’t succumbed to fatigue were my mother, though her fingers were cramped from praying so many rosaries, and the local police, who had no choice in the matter. The same roster of officers responded to each call, shepherding my father from the street to the emergency room to PESS to jail, and periodically driving past my mother’s house to make sure things were calm. I worried that before long they, too, would give up and release my father, on his own recognizance, to the street.
“And then what?
“I imagined him circling a drain, the pull of love and obligation dragging my mother and siblings and me behind him.”
Cocaine Incorporated
How Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business:
“Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s ‘insatiable demand for illegal drugs’ is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. ‘Poor Mexico,’ its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. ‘So far from God and so close to the United States.'”
Prep-School Predators
The secret history of sexual abuse inside New York’s Horace Mann School:
“Speaking calmly and staring into the flames, he told us that when he was in eighth grade, Wright sexually assaulted him. ‘And not just me,’ he added. ‘There were others.’ First Wright befriended him, he said. Then he molested him. Then he pretended nothing happened.
“No one knew what to say, at least at first. But then slowly, the rest of us started telling stories, too. One of the guys talked about a teacher who took him on a field trip, and then invited him into his bed in the hotel room they were sharing. (My friend fled, walking in the rain for hours until the coast seemed clear.) Another told a story about a teacher who got him drunk and naked; that time, no one fled. We talked about the steakhouse dinner, which was a far cry from abuse, but an example of how easy it can be for boundaries to blur and how hard it can be, in the moment, for students to get their bearings. Finally, we all went to sleep.”
Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World
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.”
Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will
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.”
Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births
A writer who’s expecting meets one of the pioneers of the home birth movement, and considers whether to have her baby at home or in a hospital:
“When I reached my due date, an ultrasound estimated that my baby weighed 9.4 pounds. I didn’t have gestational diabetes and had gained an average amount of weight, and fetal tests showed my baby was thriving. But the baby’s estimated size, combined with the fact that he hadn’t yet descended into my pelvis, worried my midwife.
“She wanted the baby out by 41 weeks, and to my surprise, she suggested I consider going straight to surgery without labor. She sent me to be evaluated by a doctor she worked with. ‘One way or another, this baby will be a C-section,’ he said.
“I wanted to avoid induction or surgery, so eight days postdate, I drank castor oil, said to be a homeopathic labor inducer, and it worked.”
Caballo Blanco’s Last Run: The Micah True Story
A look back at the life, and disappearance, of the ultrarunner known as “Caballo Blanco,” who gained fame from the 2009 best-selling book Born to Run:
“Ray Molina, 44, had not learned of the disappearance until Friday. He rushed to the Gila in his beat-up 1979 Mercedes with two friends, Jessica Haines and Dean Bannon. They were agreeable to joining the organized search. But by 10 on Saturday morning, they were among a handful yet to be assigned to a team.
“The hell with this, Molina concluded. He and his friends lightened their backpacks of unnecessary gear and went off on their own, simply walking a short distance down the access road, crossing the Gila River and scurrying into the nearest arroyo.
“This strategy, while not entirely random, was hardly well conceived. They were assisted only by a folded-up map and their own instincts and whims.
“They rambled and they ran and they climbed. They called out, ‘Caballo!'”
Pacifists in the Cross-Fire: The Kabul Hospital That Treats All Sides
Inside the Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims, a hospital in Afghanistan that’s funded by an Italian NGO and is committed to helping all victims:
“Last year, Emergency’s three hospitals and 34 clinics across Afghanistan treated nearly 360,000 patients. During the course of reporting this article, after visiting these facilities and meeting a number of these patients, I began to wonder how such a responsibility had fallen to a small, modestly financed Italian NGO. This, of course, was connected to a larger question: What is our responsibility to the Afghans who are maimed, burned, disabled and disfigured by a war we started and can’t seem to end?
“According to NATO, even civilians who are injured during operations by U.S. or other coalition forces are only ‘entitled to receive emergency care if there is threat to their life, limb or eyesight.’ In such cases, ‘discharge or transfer to an appropriate Afghan civilian facility is recommended as soon as the patient is stabilized.’ On paper, this might appear to make sense; after all, the United States and other foreign donors have invested vast sums of money in Afghanistan’s public health system. But given the poor quality of care, scarcity of equipment and pervasive graft that still defines most government hospitals, ‘discharge or transfer’ can look a lot like abandonment.”
In Libya, the Captors Have Become the Captive
With Qaddafi’s former guards now in prison, one man leads the interrogation of his brother’s killer:
“Nasser called Marwan’s father and invited him to come see his son. For the last six months, the family stayed away out of fear that the thuwar would take revenge on them all. On the following Friday, eight of them showed up at the base in Tajoura. Nasser greeted them at the door and led them downstairs. ‘It was a very emotional moment,’ Nasser said. ‘You can imagine how I felt when I saw my brother’s killer embracing his brother.’ The two brothers hugged each other for a long time, sobbing, until finally Nasser pushed them apart, because he could not bear it anymore. Later, he took one of the cousins aside and asked him if he knew why Marwan was being held. The man said no. ‘I told him: “Your cousin killed six very qualified people whom Libya will need, two doctors and four officers. One of them was my brother.” ‘ The cousin listened, and then he hugged Nasser before the family left.”