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 iPhone or iPad? Download Longform’s new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

The Lessons of Atmeh, by Joshua Hersh, Virginia Quarterly Review

In one of the harshest camps for refugees of the Syrian conflict, even the best intentions can backfire.

Because Atmeh is in a rebel-held part of Syria, where a brutal and destabilizing conflict has been underway since 2011, it inhabits a space that often seems to fall between spheres of responsibility. The Syrian government has no meaningful presence in the northern borderlands, other than to periodically send warplanes to drop bombs. The Syrian opposition, meanwhile, remains fractured and resourceless, providing little more than infrequent expressions of outrage and pleading press releases on the camp’s behalf. The Turks, who have built state-of-the-art facilities for refugees within their borders, monitor the camp from afar, but mainly to contain rather than intervene. And the United Nations, in a perverse twist, can do little but watch: Barred from operating in a sovereign nation without that government’s permission or a Security Council resolution, its officials have been largely unable to set foot inside northern Syria, let alone turn Atmeh into a proper refugee camp like those in Jordan or Turkey. The line separating Turkey from Atmeh, demarcated by as little as a waist-high stretch of barbed wire, might as well be a towering fortification.

Tales of the Trash, by Peter Hessler, New Yorker

A neighborhood garbageman explains modern Egypt.

For the leaders of the revolution, who are mostly middle and upper class, the experience of a citizen like Sayyid is a perfect example of why radical change is necessary. But there’s a point at which somebody is so far removed from the formal system that he has no interest in changing it. Sayyid never cared much about the protests in Tahrir Square, and, like most Egyptians, he tends to support whoever seems to be popular at any given moment. In 2012, he voted for Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate for President, and then, two years later, he voted for Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the general who had forcibly removed Morsi from office.

Drones and Everything After, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine

The flying, spying, killing machines that are turning humans into superheroes.

Lost in the concern that the drone is an authoritarian instrument is the possibility that it might simultaneously be a democratizing tool, enlarging not just the capacities of the state but also the reach of the individual — the private drone operator, the boy in Cupertino — whose view is profoundly altered and whose abilities are enhanced. “The idea I’m trying to work out to simplify this whole thing — surveillance, drones, robots — has to do with superhero ethics,” says Patrick Lin, a technology ethicist at California Polytechnic State University. “It’s about what humans do when they have superpowers. What happens then?”

The Day the Mountain Fell, by Joe O’Connor, National Post.

On Jan. 20, 2003, a massive avalanche killed seven people in British Columbia. The story of the tragedy that changed backcountry culture — and the guilt that shattered one guide’s life.

The avalanche struck in three successive waves. The first ripped loose from above, at approximately 2,450 metres. A second, smaller slide followed. Then came the deadly third hit, some 65 metres in width and as deep as 260 centimetres in parts; it spilled down the groups’ ascent route and ran downhill for 350 metres.

One analyst later estimated that the avalanche debris area contained 47,000 cubic metres of rock-solid snow.

‘No One’s Really in Charge’ in Hostage Negotiations, by Shane Harris, Foreign Policy.

Insiders and administration officials tell Foreign Policy that efforts to free Americans held by the Islamic State are uncoordinated, inconsistent, and crippled by bureaucratic infighting.

Even if the United States wanted to negotiate with the Islamic State, it appears to have no viable back channels to the group, which lately seems to be far more interested in butchering Americans than in taking money to set them free. Former officials who criticized the Obama administration’s handling of the hostage cases acknowledged that the efforts were hamstrung by a lack of good intelligence inside Syria, where the hostages are believed to be held amid the rubble and chaos of a three-year-long civil war. No one doubts that U.S. officials want to see the Americans freed, and those close to the efforts don’t blame the government for the Americans’ deaths. But efforts to win the hostages’ release have fallen short, and time is running out.