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.

Pussy Riot v. Putin: A Front Row Seat at a Russian Dark Comedy

by Julia Ioffe, The New Republic

Inside the puppet trial of the decade.

The main effect of the grueling twelve-hour sessions was the deterioration of the defendants’ health. On the third day, an ambulance had to be called twice for the girls (and for Volkova, who had worked herself up into a tizzy), but the paramedics determined they were fit to stand trial. Volkova started a shouting match with the judge: Her clients were not given time to sleep, and were not being fed. “When I asked the bailiff whether they’d eaten, he told me they’d been fed tea!” she shouted. The judge said it was not the court’s prerogative to deal with such things. When the defense team attempted to pass a bottle of water into the aquarium, every cop in the room lunged to intercept it. Afterwards, an attorney for the plaintiff, Lev Lyalin, himself a religious man who was representing three of the victims, told me, “You know, I’ve been an attorney for a long time, and I can tell you’ve never seen a court work at this clip before. Even I don’t feel well, and I’m not in prison.”

Unlivable Cities

by Isaac Stone Fish, Foreign Policy

China’s megalopolises may seem impressive on paper, but they are awful places to live.

The yard is just two metres square,” writes author Ma Jian in the travelogue Red Dust, about the “crumbling old shack” he lived in off a Beijing courtyard in 1981, an improvement from his previous quarters in a dormitory. “In the summer months, watermelon skins and empty ice-cream cartons fall from the flats and attract swarms of flies and mosquitoes, so I tend to stay indoors. Winter is the best season as my neighbours seal their windows.” Antoaneta Becker, a former journalist from Bulgaria who studied at Peking University, Beijing’s premier college, in the late 1980s, said that it was so boring that “there was nothing to do but sit and meditate on the meaning of existence.”

Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Keystone

by John H. Richardson, Esquire

On the economics, impact, and communities of the international pipeline.

When you arrive at night in Fort McMurray, the little Canadian town that might just destroy the world, the tiny airport looks smaller because of the snow and all the Explorers and Rangers and four-wheel drives in the parking lot. An ambitious ramp enters a highway so wide the shoulders must be in different time zones, and trucks the size of dinosaurs roar by belching clouds of steam and snow. The smaller trucks have buggy whips that hoist flags high above them so the giant trucks will notice their insignificant speck existence and avoid running over them. The giants are so large they need little pilot trucks to guide them, one ahead and one behind. Largest of all are the hauler trucks that pull hoppers piled with tons of black sand, the prize of all this furious enterprise. They look like props from Star Wars— you expect a turret to swivel and shoot out death rays. But what they actually do might turn out to be more deadly. Here, they gouge and siphon that black sand from deep in the earth and through an awesome alchemical process turn it into something resembling crude oil. A triumph of science and engineering. And nearby lie the beginnings of a nineteen-hundred-mile international pipeline — the Keystone XL, it’s called — that will carry a million barrels of the stuff every day, down through the breadbasket of America to the Gulf Coast of Texas, where it will be refined and shipped to the emerging economic powers of the world.

The War Against Nuba

by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Review of Books

A rare look into the Sudans’ bitter territorial conflict.

We flew over savannahs and primordial forests before reaching a set of undulating hills the tawny color of lions. We hit the ground hard, hurtling through the tall grass, past pickup trucks smeared with mud intended as camouflage and dozens of rebel soldiers toting machine guns. Our contact, a friendly young Nuba aid worker named Nagwa, took us to a waiting Land Cruiser. “Welcome to the Nuba Mountains,” she said. “Now let’s get out of here.”

ADRIANE OHANESIAN/AFP/GettyImages

Weather Gone Wild

by Peter Miller, National Geographic.

This summer, weird weather extremes are occurring all over the world. What is going on with our climate?

But natural cycles can’t by themselves explain the recent streak of record-breaking disasters. Something else is happening too: The Earth is steadily getting warmer, with significantly more moisture in the atmosphere. Decades of observations from the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, as well as from thousands of other weather stations, satellites, ships, buoys, deep-ocean probes, and balloons, show that a long-term buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is trapping heat and warming up the land, oceans, and atmosphere.

HECTOR GUERRERO/AFP/GettyImages

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