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.

Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures.

“In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for ‘A Better Life in My Neighborhood’ — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.”

In 1904, Ota Benga was kidnapped from Congo and taken to the US, where he was exhibited with monkeys. His appalling story reveals the roots of a racial prejudice that still haunts us.

“The black clergymen who had been summoned to Harlem’s Mount Olivet Baptist Church for an emergency meeting on the morning of Monday 10 September 1906, arrived in a state of outrage. A day earlier, the New York Times had reported that a young African man – a so-called ‘pygmy’ – had been put on display in the monkey house of the city’s largest zoo. Under the headline ‘Bushman Shares a Cage With Bronx Park Apes,’ the paper reported that crowds of up to 500 people at a time had gathered around the cage to gawk at the diminutive Ota Benga – just under 5ft tall, weighing 103lb – while he preoccupied himself with a pet parrot, deftly shot his bow and arrow, or wove a mat and hammock from bundles of twine placed in the cage. Children giggled and hooted with delight while adults laughed, many uneasily, at the sight.

In anticipation of larger crowds after the publicity in the New York Times, Benga was moved from a smaller chimpanzee cage to one far larger, to make him more visible to spectators. He was also joined by an orangutan called Dohang. While crowds massed to leer at him, the boyish Benga, who was said to be 23 but appeared far younger, sat silently on a stool, staring – sometimes glaring – through the bars.”

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

“Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. ‘Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,’ the message read. ‘Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.’

St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?”

The Ambassador, France, and World War II.

“As a fledgling diplomat, Bullitt had predicted World War II exactly 20 years before it began—not only in this same capital city, but in the very hotel, the Crillon, across from the U.S. embassy, where in June 1940 he would dutifully pay his respects to the monocled German general who was presiding over the transition from a democratically-elected, if dysfunctional, dominion to a foreign autocratic occupation. In 1919, he had been Woodrow Wilson’s secret envoy to the Bolsheviks and the fair-haired boy of Wilson’s alter ego, Colonel Edward House. Bullitt had plotted his own version of a just and lasting conclusion to the Great War (which included a precarious truce that he personally negotiated with Lenin). But because his elders at the Paris Peace Conference had subsumed reconciliation and economic justice to vengeance, he warned that the emergent Treaty of Versailles would instead precipitate ‘a century of wars.’ His subsequent testimony in Washington would be credited, or cursed, for almost singlehandedly derailing ratification of the treaty by Congress.”

This Arabic-language, M.I.A.-inspired Israeli girl band from the Negev desert is looking to become the Arab world’s next pop superstar. History isn’t on its side.

“The music video for ‘Habib Galbi’ (Love of My Heart), a sorrowful Yemeni folk song, opens with a simple shot across the desert. Inside a small hut, an exasperated woman pulls back the woven curtain of a Bedouin tent and croons in Arabic over a hollow, hypnotic drumbeat and ghostly minor key: ‘Love of my heart and eyes, it is a wonder who has turned you against me.’

From the shisha-smoking old lady with kohl-lined eyes, to the Yemeni dance sequences and classically Arabic mournful undertones, ‘Habib Galbi’ looks like it could be straight out of southern Arabia. And in some ways, it is: The song is sung in authentic Yemeni dialect and is composed from the lyrics of ancient Yemeni folk songs. When a Yemeni friend recently played ‘Habib Galbi’ for his elderly grandmother in Sanaa, their accents were so good she thought that the all-girl singing trio might be from the Haraz, a rugged mountainous region just west of the capital.”

Frederic Dupoux/Getty Images; Bruce Bennett/Getty Images; /AFP/Getty Images; JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP/Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images