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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, Vanity Fair,Outside Magazine, Narratively, The New York Review of Books, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Catherine Kustanczy.
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, Vanity Fair,Outside Magazine, Narratively, The New York Review of Books, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Catherine Kustanczy.
“Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It.” — David Kaiser, Lovisa Stannow, New York Review of Books
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Deadspin, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Megan Hess.
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, #fiction from The New York Review of Books, plus a guest pick from Eva Holland.
What is it that makes HBO’s Girls so special? Start with the sex scenes:
Afterward, while she is getting dressed, Hannah jokingly refers to herself as the eleven-year-old girl. Adam looks confused and asks what she’s talking about. Hannah reminds him about his fantasy, but clearly her joke has fallen flat, and the disparity between their respective experiences of sex is further amplified: Adam had been blissfully lost to himself while they were doing it, while Hannah was taking mental notes. It is, among other things, an amusing metaphor for Hannah’s chosen profession: the writer is the one busily jotting in her notebook while other people are having orgasms.
“The Loves of Lena Dunham.” — Elaine Blair, New York Review of Books
How the U.S. drone program became central to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts. The president has presided over 268 covert drone strikes, five times what George W. Bush ordered:
But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we’re not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. What’s more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.
‘Drones have really become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration,’ says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor who helped establish a new Pentagon office devoted to legal and humanitarian policy. ‘What I don’t think has happened enough is taking a big step back and asking, “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing? Are we fostering militarism and extremism in the very places we’re trying to attack it?” A great deal about the drone strikes is still shrouded in secrecy. It’s very difficult to evaluate from the outside how serious of a threat the targeted people pose.’
See also: “Predators and Robots at War.” — Christian Caryl, New York Review of Books, Sept. 20, 2011
Featured Longreader: Christopher Butler, writer, reader, vice president of Newfangled.com. See his story picks from the New York Review of Books, Domus, Grist, plus more on his #longreads page.
Judt’s widow Jennifer Homans reflects on her husband’s life and the making of his last book:
I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal, from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010, and during it Tony managed against all human odds to write three books. The last, following “Ill Fares the Land” and “The Memory Chalet,” was “Thinking the Twentieth Century,” based on conversations with Timothy Snyder. He started work on the book soon after he was diagnosed; within months he was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, but he kept working nonetheless. He and Tim finished the book a month before he died. It accompanied his illness; it was part of his illness, and part of his dying.
“Tony Judt: A Final Victory.” — Jennifer Homans, New York Review of Books
See also: “The Forgiveness Machine.” — Tim Adams, Guardian, April 10 2011
Africa is changing—but when it comes to conflict, the battles are smaller, messier and not necessarily driven by a specific purpose:
This is the story of conflict in Africa these days. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic wars by freedom fighters and the proliferation of something else—something wilder, messier, more predatory, and harder to define. The style of warfare has shifted dramatically since the liberation wars of the 1960s and 1970s (Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau), the cold-war wars of the 1980s (Angola, Mozambique), and the large-scale killings of the 1990s (Somalia, Congo, Rwanda, Liberia). Today the continent is plagued by countless nasty little wars, which in many ways aren’t really wars at all. There are no front lines, no battlefields, no clear conflict zones, and no distinctions between combatants and civilians, which is why the kind of massacre that happened near Niangara is sadly common.
“Africa’s Dirty Wars.” — Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Review of Books
See also: “Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy.” — David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2011
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