A pool salesman struggles to cope with a weak economy, which has forced him to rethink the meaning of the American Dream: ‘You can’t be too safe or too smart about money with the economy now,’ Tyler said. ‘I want to save up and make the smart investments.’ ‘You’ll make them,’ Frank said, nodding. ‘I […]
The Washington Post
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The candidate’s former prep school classmates recall a bullying incident that still troubles them to this day: A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed […]
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The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency: It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters […]
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A former research assistant for Bob Woodward is hired to help Ben Bradlee work on another book, and discovers that the former Washington Post managing editor still has unresolved questions from the Watergate era: Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage […]
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Most attention has been on the Supreme Court fight over The Affordable Care Act’s mandate to expand health insurance to 30 million more Americans. But what’s overshadowed is what the rest of the law is doing to change the business model for health care: The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality […]
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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 […]
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A family discovers new details about their son’s death in Iraq, and wonders why the U.S. lieutenant responsible was not punished: A year after Dave Sharrett II died, his parents, Vicki and Dave Sr., were nearly at peace. They had come to accept the Army’s explanation of how it all happened in the “fog of […]
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The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up: I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if […]
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Lawrence Egbert, a retired anesthesiologist from Baltimore, has been present for 100 suicides in the last 15 years. But he is more reluctant in his leading role, in contrast to the late Jack Kevorkian: I ask Egbert how much helium it takes to kill a person. “I don’t know,” he says. He recommends buying 50-liter […]
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The story of a woman, the husband she vowed to care for, and the complications about how their relationship changed after his severe brain injury: On a Saturday morning in the spring of 2010, Page had arranged for Robert to come home from Sunrise for breakfast. She had asked Robert’s brother Will to drive down […]