The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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A true crime story in a small town:
“He was gonna do this and save the children,” she testified. “I don’t remember exactly the conversation. He had me convinced that Catherine was the bad guy and he was the good parent and his kids were abused and his kids were miserable and we need to save the kids.”
“Did he tell you anything about what he needed to do about Catherine before Dec. 12?” the district attorney asked her.
“That he needed to kill her.”

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
***
How Medellín went from crime-ridden cocaine capital to one of the world’s most innovative cities:
The Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, perhaps the only drug lord to become a worldwide household name, transported billions of dollars worth of cocaine, which had surpassed coffee as Colombia’s leading export by 1982. Arriving on U.S. shores, the exploits of cocaine cowboys made Miami the murder capital of the world in the early ’80s, an ignominious title Medellín itself stole in 1991, when it topped out at 381 murders per 100,000 residents, 40 times what the United Nations considers “epidemic.” That rate, if translated to New York
In 1982 three teenagers were found savagely stabbed to death by a lake in Waco, Texas. Four men were found guilty and two were sentenced to death. Were they guilty? Michael Hall spent one year reporting this five-parts series for Texas Monthly:
This story examines the case through the viewpoint of five people: a patrol sergeant who investigated the crime; a police detective who became skeptical of the investigation; an appellate lawyer who tried to stop the execution; a journalist whose reporting has raised new doubts about the case; and a convict who pleaded guilty but now vehemently proclaims his innocence.

Gif via Justin Blinder’s ‘Vacated’ project.
White suburban churches invade urban spaces with no regard for the churches already in place.
Setting fires, locking tenants out and willfully destroying a building’s infrastructure–evil landlords will go to great lengths to dispose of their rent-stabilized tenants in hopes of increasing rent and making thousands off new residents.
Is a healthy future possible for “the murder capital of New York?”
Gentrification might bring New York City or San Francisco to mind, but Campanella takes the reader to “the Williamsburg of the South”: Bywater, New Orleans. He delves into the history of gentrification in Louisiana, which dates back to the 1920s.
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Communication Management Units, or CMUs, are cloaked in secrecy. They segregate prisoners accused of terrorism, stripped of rights and held in isolation:
We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref. “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the first five years of her life, she only knew him as the man on the other side of a plexiglass window in a communication management unit in an Indiana federal penitentiary.
Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law. By September 2009, about 70 percent of the CMU prisoners were Muslim, more than 1,000 to 1,200 percent more than the federal prison average of Muslim inmates.

-Journalist Joe McGinniss, from The Selling of the President 1968, hailed as one of the classic books about the modern marketing of a presidential candidate. McGinniss, who also wrote books including Fatal Vision, died Monday at age 71 from complications related to prostate cancer.
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In 1998 a district attorney sent a teenager to life in prison for his role in a murder of a 16-year-old girl. In Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff revisits the case and looks at why the DA is questioning the life sentence years later:
Read more stories from Pamela Colloff
Photo: Julian Frost

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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