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 new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader, by David Barboza. The New York Times.

Through the course of his leadership, relatives of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao ave gained incredible wealth — riches accumulated through help from state-owned companies, government contracts, and industries ruled by agencies overseen by Mr. Wen himself. An examination of financial nepotism in China reveals a collision between business and state influence.

While Communist Party regulations call for top officials to disclose their wealth and that of their immediate family members, no law or regulation prohibits relatives of even the most senior officials from becoming deal-makers or major investors — a loophole that effectively allows them to trade on their family name. Some Chinese argue that permitting the families of Communist Party leaders to profit from the country’s long economic boom has been important to ensuring elite support for market-oriented reforms.

Even so, the business dealings of Mr. Wen’s relatives have sometimes been hidden in ways that suggest the relatives are eager to avoid public scrutiny, the records filed with Chinese regulatory authorities show.

Wen: Feng Li/Getty Images

Nineteen Seventy Three, by Alan Bellows. Damn Interesting.

In the 1970s, Chile was on the verge of developing sophisticated technology to monitor its economy. Then America intervened.

In the early 1970s the scale of Beer’s proposed network was unprecedented. One of the largest computer networks of the day was a mere fifteen machines in the US, the military progenitor to the Internet known as ARPANET. Beer was suggesting a network with hundreds or thousands of endpoints. Moreover, the computational complexity of his concept eclipsed even that of the Apollo moon missions, which were still ongoing at that time. After a few hours of conversation President Allende responded to the audacious proposition: Chile must indeed become the world’s first cybernetic government, for the good of the people. Work was to start straight away.

Stafford Beer practically ran across the street to share the news with his awaiting technical team, and much celebratory drinking occurred that evening. But the ambitious cybernetic network would never become fully operational if the CIA had anything to say about it.

STF/AFP/Getty Images

‘Perplexed … Perplexed’: On Mob Justice in Nigeria, by Teju Cole. The Atlantic.

Why is lynching so common in Nigeria? And what is being done to stem the violence?

When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work,and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers. And even though I know that lynchings would largely disappear in a Nigeria with rule of law and strong institutions — just as they have largely disappeared in other places where they were once common — I still wonder what extreme traumas have brought us to this peculiar pass.

UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images

Paradise with an Asterisk, by S.C. Gwynne. Outside.

Today, much of Bikini Island appears to be a peaceful Eden where fish, animals, and plant life thrive. Yet, 54 years after the United States finished testing 23 nuclear weapons on the atoll, deadly levels of radiation still keep native Bikinians from permanently returning to the land they believe god gifted them.

Over the course of a nuclear exile that has lasted 66 years, the Bikinian people have been relocated five times. They have nearly starved to death. They have seen their way of life vanish. They have watched as nuclear scientists swarmed over their island, trying to figure out what the bombs had done to it. They have fought the U.S. government in legal battles all the way to the Supreme Court. Alson was part of a group of three extended families who moved back to the island in the 1970s after it had been declared safe. He lived the fantasy existence he describes for me, only to be told, after the discovery of the horrifying cesium 137, that he and his people had to leave.

National Archive/Newsmakers

Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It? By David Quammen. Popular Science.

On the origins of outbreaks.

A horse dies mysteriously in Australia, and people around it fall sick. A chimpanzee carcass in Central Africa passes Ebola to the villagers who scavenge and eat it. A palm civet, served at a Wild Flavors restaurant in southern China, infects one diner with a new ailment, which spreads to Hong Kong, Toronto, Hanoi, and Singapore, eventually to be known as SARS. These cases and others, equally spooky, represent not isolated events but a pattern, a trend: the emergence of new human diseases from wildlife.

Carlos JASSO/AFP/Getty Images