9 Dec 2016

Weekly Reading: The best longreads all in one place

9:38 am on 9 December 2016

Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.

 

Bernie Sanders talks to GQ about the failings of the left and meeting rapper Killer Mike

Bernie Sanders talks to GQ about the failings of the left and meeting rapper Killer Mike Photo: 123rf

They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals, Daniel Berehulak, New York Times

“I have worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa’s Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death. What I experienced in the Philippines felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers’ summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes’ taking seriously Mr. Duterte’s call to “slaughter them all.”

He said in October, “You can expect 20,000 or 30,000 more.”

 

How to hide $400 million, Nicholas Confessore, New York Times

“But even as Pursglove was repacking her suitcase for the flight home, her family’s fortune was vanishing into an almost impenetrable array of shell companies, bank accounts and trusts, part of a worldwide financial system catering exclusively to the very wealthy. In recent decades, this system has become astonishingly effective at “offshoring” wealth — detaching assets, through complex layers of ownership and legal planning, from their actual owners, often by hiding them in another country. Created by lawyers, accountants and private bankers and operating out of a global archipelago of European principalities, former British colonies and Asian city-states, the system has one main purpose: to make the richest people in the world appear to own as little as possible.”

 

The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn, Margaret Talbot, New Yorker

“One morning in March, in a courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, a young woman named Norma attended the sentencing of a former boyfriend, who had gone to grotesque lengths to humiliate her online. Four years earlier, when she was seventeen, she had met Christopher Morcos, who was then nineteen, at a Starbucks near her home, in Nutley. He was a business student at a local college, and Norma, who is soft-spoken, liked that he was outgoing. He was her first boyfriend, and they dated for two years. Like a lot of young men these days, he asked Norma to send him explicit selfies, and, like a lot of young women, she did. She made him promise that he would keep the pictures to himself. He assured her that he had hidden them on an app with a secure password, and that in any case he would never circulate them. Once in a while, however, he made a joke about doing just that.”

 

The Last Unknown Man, Matt Wolfe, New Republic

“He appeared out of nowhere. He had no name, no memory, no past. He was the only person the FBI ever listed as missing even though they knew where he was. How could B.K. Doe remain anonymous in the modern age’s matrix of observation?”

 

Intake: locked on the psych wards, Rosalind Adams, Buzzfeed

“Your job is to get patients,” said a former clinician at Salt Lake Behavioral. “And you get them however you get them.” Current and former employees from at least 10 UHS hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure to fill beds by almost any method — which sometimes meant exaggerating people’s symptoms or twisting their words to make them seem suicidal — and to hold them until their insurance payments ran out.”

 

Bernie Sanders on Donald Trump’s Victory, Identity Politics, and the Failures of the Democratic Party, Jason Zengerle, GQ

GQ: But you did a good job finding unlikely interlocutors, like the Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, who became an outspoken supporter.

Bernie Sanders: Killer Mike is a serious guy.

GQ: Exactly. Your web-video interview with him was fascinating.

BS: It turns out that Killer Mike is an extremely bright guy.

GQ: I assume somebody had to explain to you who Killer Mike was.

BS: Yes, they did. The name got me a little bit nervous. But Killer Mike has never killed anybody. It's just, he's a killer rapper.