Longform’s Picks of the Week

Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s brand-new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan, by Edith Zimmerman. New York Times Magazine.

How Cosmo, with 64 international editions and a readership that would make it the world’s 16th largest country, conquered the globe.

The repetition can be a little numbing, but it may help explain how Cosmo, which is the best-selling monthly magazine in the United States, has morphed into such a global juggernaut. (“If all the Cosmo readers from around the world came together,” read a recent piece in Cosmo South Africa, “this group would form the 16th-largest country in the world.”) Through those 64 editions, the magazine now spreads wild sex stories to 100 million teens and young women (making it closer to the 12th-largest country, actually) in more than 100 nations — including quite a few where any discussion of sex is taboo. And plenty of others where reading a glossy magazine still carries cachet. (“Many girls consider a hard copy of Cosmo to be an important accessory,” says Maya Akisheva, the editor of Cosmo Kazakhstan.) As the brand proudly points out, in 2011 alone, these readers spent $1.4 billion on shoes, $400 million on cars, $2.5 billion on beauty products and $1.5 billion on fragrance and bought 24 million pairs of jeans.

Aaron Tam/AFP/Getty Images

The Narco Tunnels of Nogales, by Adam Higginbotham. Businessweek.

The underground routes by which drugs enter the U.S. from Mexico, and the officials who’ve found it almost impossible to curb their construction.

Although quantification is impossible, the underground shipment routes represent a significant economic investment, one that far exceeds the time and money spent on the homemade submarines, ultralight aircraft, and catapults used to move narcotics elsewhere. Some tunnels cost at least a million dollars to build and require architects, engineers, and teams of miners to work for months at a stretch. A few include spectacular feats of engineering, running as much as 100 feet deep, with electric rail systems, elevators, and hydraulic doors. But the economies of scale are extraordinary. Tunnels like these can be used to move several tons of narcotics in a single night.

John Moore/Getty Images

Plasenzuela’s Dirty Secrets, by Guillermo Abril. El País.

Welcome to Plasenzuela, Spain, whose 500 inhabitants enjoyed no-show jobs, spent millions on phantom projects and defrauded Social Security.

“That’s pretty heavy isn’t it?” he asks, sitting in his living room. He says that the village is split over his decision to uncover the corruption. He doesn’t go out much. He says that his children are asking awkward questions. He no longer sees his general practitioner, preferring to use a medical center in a neighboring village. Piles of press cuttings and other documents lie on the table, figures and calculations. In January 2010, the village owed the Social Security 2.9 million. “From 1997 to 2007, the period when Villegas was mayor, not a cent was paid in Social Security,” he says. González claims that around 70 or so people each month were given bogus contracts and signed up to the Social Security. The mayor even signed up some 50 Moroccan laborers that never set foot in Plasenzuela. The aim was to have enough employees to be able to apply for subsidies. But the town hall kept the Social Security contributions. There is no record of the money to be found, and neither is there any record of what happened to the subsidies and funding for dozens of projects that never existed. The important thing during Villegas’ decade-long boom is that the village had zero unemployment, even if there were no jobs.

CRISTINA QUICLER/AFP/GettyImages

A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away, Elisabeth Bumiller. New York Times.

The emotional toll on drone pilots.

When he was deployed in Iraq, “you land and there’s no more weapons on your F-16, people have an idea of what you were just involved with.” Now he steps out of a dark room of video screens, his adrenaline still surging after squeezing the trigger, and commutes home past fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to help with homework – but always alone with what he has done.

“It’s a strange feeling,” he said. “No one in my immediate environment is aware of anything that occurred.”

ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

Our Man in Kigali, by Anjan Sundaram. Foreign Policy.

For years, Rwanda’s budding dictator, Paul Kagame, has gotten away with murder, while winning praise (and billions of dollars) from the West. But is the blind support for this strongman finally drying up?

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has called him “one of the greatest leaders of our time”; former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has described him as a “visionary.” In fact, Clinton was in Rwanda with his daughter on July 19 to inaugurate a new cancer hospital and issue more praise for “the strong national leadership … from His Excellency President Kagame.” (There are no reports that Clinton discussed the M23 allegations with Kagame.) Visiting U.N. supremos regularly say that Rwanda has much to teach the world about good governance. On June 23, 2010, the day before the journalist was killed in Kigali, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon named Kagame co-leader of a prestigious panel of development experts, dubbed the Millennium Development Goals “superheroes.”

While all this was happening, aid to Rwanda kept steadily increasing, and more and more of it was channeled directly to Kagame’s government. The adulation and money gave Kagame an aura of invincibility. If the president was seen as doing no wrong, it gave him the ability to act with impunity, whether overseeing repression in his own country or pursuing his opponents and interests in Congo and the world.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images

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