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.

Hell in the Hot Zone, by Jeffrey E. Stern, Vanity Fair.

As the Ebola epidemic rages, two questions have emerged: How did the deadly virus escape detection for three months? And why has a massive international effort failed to contain it? 

“When Ebola strikes, it kills quickly, but it can take up to three weeks to incubate, and usually around 10 days. The period is long enough that contact with a possible source may have been forgotten, and long enough for infected people to travel without symptoms. And even if you tested for Ebola—which nobody in Guinea had the capacity to do—you wouldn’t find it during the incubation period: Ebola can’t be detected in the blood until symptoms show. An epidemic can start slowly and go unnoticed for weeks. This has never been much of an issue before, because Ebola tends not to find its way into large population centers, or places where people are very mobile. This time would be different.

On January 24, more than a month after the first infection, Jean Claude Kpoghomou, a doctor in the town of Tekolo, called a superior to report on something strange happening in a village under his jurisdiction. Three patients had died in the span of two days, he said. All of them came from the same village, a place called Meliandou. The symptoms looked like cholera: diarrhea, vomiting, extreme dehydration. Cholera outbreaks were not uncommon in Guinea. An especially devastating outbreak had occurred just two years earlier, and Meliandou had even been one of the villages targeted for a public-health education campaign. A big pictographic billboard was installed at the entrance to the village, with explicit instructions for the mostly illiterate villagers about how to avoid contaminating the water supply. ”

From China to Jihad?, by Richard Bernstein, the New York Review of Books.

More than two hundred members of the Uighur minority from Xinjiang — many of them women and children — were arrested by Thai authorities in March this year. They have been accused, apparently, of planning to wage jihad in Syria.

“Xinjiang, the traditional Uighur homeland, making up one-sixth of China’s total area, has emerged as a kind of Muslim Tibet, an unstable territory in China’s deep interior. To Chinese leaders, Xinjiang may be even more worrisome than Tibet, since they clearly believe that its large Muslim population is susceptible to Islamic extremism that they claim is seeping in from neighboring Central Asia. And there has been serious violence. Since last fall about one hundred people are known to have died in Uighur-related violence, which China blames on what it refers to as “the three evils” of separatism, extremism, and terrorism. In March, eight knife-wielding Uighur men and women attacked commuters in the Kunming train station, far from Xinjiang, killing twenty-nine people. And in May, a group of Uighurs killed forty-three people in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi when they drove explosives-laden SUVs into a morning market.

Amid such violence, the Chinese police have stepped up repressive measures. Last year, the heads of Xinjiang’s universities announced that only “politically qualified” students would be allowed to graduate, and instructed education authorities to exercise closer supervision of their students, including monitoring them during their vacations and making sure they don’t wear “religious clothing.” Meanwhile, numerous alleged troublemakers have been jailed. In May, for example, Xinjiang public security officials arrested 232 people for “dissemination of violent or terrorist videos.” China has also been enforcing its strict birth-control policies on Uighurs, who, if they live in cities, are subject to forced abortions if they try to have more than two children. At the same time, large-scale ethnic Han migration to Xinjiang has turned the Uighurs into minorities in many places.”

The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys, by Jenny Nordberg, the Atlantic.

In a society that demands sons at almost any cost, some families are cutting their daughters’ hair short and giving them male names.

“No one knows how many bacha posh children there are in Afghanistan. They are a minority, but it is not uncommon to see them in the villages throughout the country. There are usually one or two in a school, and often one as a helper in a small store. The health workers I’ve spoken to have all witnessed the practice and agree that every family with only daughters will consider switching one to a boy. In their view, it is mostly to the girl’s advantage to live a few years as a boy, before her other, more difficult life of childrearing of her own begins.

In neighboring countries such as India, where sons are similarly much preferred over daughters, ultrasound machines are among the most sought-after equipment by doctors and patients. According to the author Mara Hvistendahl in Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, 160 million female fetuses have already been aborted throughout Asia, skewing the demographic for generations to come and creating acute problems for societies lacking women. Although both ultrasound screenings and secret late-term abortions are available in Kabul for those who can pay, most rural parts of Afghanistan are not there yet. Women in these areas just hope to avoid bringing too many daughters into this world.”

The Masked Avengers, by David Kushner, the New Yorker.

How Anonymous incited online vigilantism from Tunisia to Ferguson.

“In 2003, Christopher Poole, a fifteen-year-old insomniac from New York City, launched 4chan, a discussion board where fans of anime could post photographs and snarky comments. The focus quickly widened to include many of the Internet’s earliest memes: LOLcats, Chocolate Rain, RickRolls. Users who did not enter a screen name were given the default handle Anonymous.

Poole hoped that anonymity would keep things irreverent. “We have no intention of partaking in intelligent discussions concerning foreign affairs,” he wrote on the site. One of the highest values within the 4chan community was the pursuit of “lulz,” a term derived from the acronym LOL. Lulz were often achieved by sharing puerile jokes or images, many of them pornographic or scatological. The most shocking of these were posted on a part of the site labelled /b/, whose users called themselves /b/tards. Doyon was aware of 4chan, but considered its users “a bunch of stupid little pranksters.” Around 2004, some people on /b/ started referring to “Anonymous” as an independent entity.”

National Insecurity, by David Rothkopf, Foreign Policy.

Can Obama’s foreign policy be saved?

“With Syria festering for more than two years amid pleas to the United States for leadership and support from longtime regional allies, the media was primed to respond, and many critics immediately assailed the president for being indecisive. It was a charge that, despite the president’s tough decisions on issues such as launching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, had not bubbled up overnight.

It was clear from the outset that Congress would never approve the president’s request and that, in asking for it, he was effectively seeking to be denied — as if to say, “Stop me before I take a risk I really don’t want to take.” It also set a precedent that would seemingly require the president to seek congressional approval for future military actions, even though the War Powers Resolution explicitly notes that he does not require it.”