The Trump Presidency has been exhausting in any number of ways. It is an attention vortex that sometimes makes us lose sight of other matters that are just as deserving of our absorption. The release of the redacted Mueller report, this week, was yet another one of those maelstrom moments, in a Presidency full of them. It was undeniably historic, and the repercussions will continue to unfold in the months to come. Here at The New Yorker we published eight pieces about it on Thursday alone. This weekend, however, we thought it worth highlighting several significant pieces of reporting and writing we published over the past week that have nothing to do with the special counsel’s investigation.
Mike Spies writes about a small group of N.R.A. executives, contractors, and venders that has “extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget, through gratuitous payments, sweetheart deals, and opaque financial arrangements,” leaving the organization in dire financial condition. Ben Taub tells the story of Mohamedou Salahi, who spent more than fourteen years in detention at Guantánamo Bay, where he was repeatedly tortured, and the guard who befriended him and came to believe that he was innocent. Robin Wright reports from Syria about thousands of former ISIS fighters being held in “pop-up prisons,” following the collapse of the Islamic State, and the dilemma over what to do with them. And Katy Waldman wrestles with complicated questions around appropriation in fiction, after discovering herself in a novel.
All are worthy of your time.
“The organization’s leadership is focussed on external threats, but the real crisis may be internal.”
“The U.S. military prison’s leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. But his guard suspected otherwise.”
“Citizens of more than eighty nations have joined ISIS. After five years of conflict, few of their governments have stepped up to take them back.”
“I was reviewing a novel. Then I found myself in it.”
