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.

“The Faithful” by Graciela Mochkofsky, California Sunday Magazine

René and Juan Carlos set out to convert their Colombian megachurch to Orthodox Judaism. This is what happened.

In 1998, the Colombian government reported that 3,800 young men had died violently in Bello during the previous decade. The finding prodded authorities to show that they were doing something to address the problem. A young psychologist went to the mayor with a proposal: Gather Bello’s worst and best and send them to the Negev Desert in Israel, far away from their violent environment. Then: instant resocialization. The mayor liked the idea and recruited youth leaders, among them René and the feuding bosses of Bello’s deadliest gangs — Fredy, El Negro, Marcelino — and flew them to Israel.

It turned out the sicarios did not have trouble fraternizing with Boy Scouts, Catholic Action enthusiasts, and the evangelical faithful. The problem was their own kind: El Negro’s bullet was still lodged in Fredy’s neck. Who could convince them to forgive and forget? The program’s organizers turned to René.

“Nestlé’s Half-Billion-Dollar Noodle Debacle in India” by Erika Fry, Fortune 

Nestlé spent three decades building a beloved noodle brand in India. Then the world’s biggest food and beverage company stumbled into a public relations debacle that cost it half a billion dollars. A cautionary tale of mangled crisis management on an epic scale.

Khajuria is not accustomed to receiving urgent, late-night phone calls. As head of corporate affairs for Nestlé India, he typically divides his time between handling routine regulatory issues and trumpeting the company’s achievements in “creating shared value”—the approach to corporate social responsibility that Nestlé espouses. In fact, Khajuria, 51, was in New York to represent his company in a shared value leadership summit, for which Nestlé was a sponsor.

Virtually everything in his world had appeared to be in order when he boarded his flight to New York. There was just one pesky issue to clear up. Health officials in one of India’s 29 states had raised questions after testing a sample of one of Nestlé India’s bestselling products: Maggi 2-Minute Noodles.

“How Uber conquered London” by Sam Knight, The Guardian 

To understand how the $60 billion company is taking over the world, you need to stop thinking about cars.

When you open the app, Uber’s logo flaps briefly before disappearing to reveal the city streets around you, and the grey, yet promising shapes of vehicles nurdling nearby. The sense of abundance that this invokes can make you think that Uber has always been here, that its presence in your neighbourhood is somehow natural and ordained. But that is not the case. To take over a city, Uber flies in a small team, known as “launchers” and hires its first local employee, whose job it is to find drivers and recruit riders. In London, that was a young Scottish banker named Richard Howard.

Howard was 27 and had recently been made redundant by HSBC, where he sold credit default swaps, a form of derivative that became notorious during the financial crisis. He grew up in Glasgow, where his father sold musical instruments, and never felt entirely at home in the deferential, bonus-driven atmosphere of investment banking. When he lost his job in November 2011, Howard figured that tech must be the coming thing. He began to trawl technology news and, like a lot other people, was struck by reports of a fundraising round for a startup called Uber the following month. It wasn’t just the money – a valuation of $300m for a company that had been up and running for 17 months – but the seriousness of the players involved: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Menlo Ventures, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture capital firms; Goldman Sachs.

“The Mastermind, Episode 7: The Next Big Deal” by Evan Ratcliff, The Atavist Magazine

He was a brilliant programmer and a vicious cartel boss who became a prized U.S. government asset. The Atavist Magazine presents a story of an elusive criminal kingpin, told in weekly installments.

After Paul Calder Le Roux was captured in 2012, his status was guarded with fanatical secrecy by the United States government. His location and even his lawyer’s name were known only to federal law enforcement. At first his clandestine status made sense, of course: Through at least mid-2014, Le Roux was essentially an undercover DEA operative in U.S. custody. By virtue of his phone calls and emails, agents were able to build elaborate sting operations around the fiction that he was still out in the world.

The illusion was fragile. As early as December 2013, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that Le Roux had been arrested. Fortunately for the DEA, that story was published in Portuguese and didn’t spread widely. Then, a year later, The New York Times discovered that Le Roux was the cooperator behind the takedown of Joseph “Rambo” Hunter, arrested for plotting to kill a DEA agent. Le Roux’s time as a government asset was over.

“The Asteroid Miner’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Matthew Shaer, Foreign Policy

U.S. companies are preparing to tap the solar system’s riches. But will they share the trillion-dollar deep-space market with hungry foreign competitors?

Kfir pitched me on the long-term plan. First, a fleet of satellites will be dispatched to outer space, fitted with probes that can measure the quality and quantity of water and minerals in nearby asteroids and comets. Later, armed with that information, mining companies like DSI will send out vessels to mechanically remove and refine the material extracted. In some cases, the take will be returned to Earth. But most of the time, it will be processed in space — for instance, to produce rocket fuel — and stored in container vessels that will serve as the equivalent of gas stations for outbound spacecraft.

This possibility isn’t so unrealistic, Kfir said. Consider the recent and seismic growth of the space industry, he suggested, as we climbed the stairs to DSI’s second-floor suite. Every year, the private spaceflight sector grows larger, and every year the goals become grander. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the space exploration company Blue Origin, has spoken of the day “when millions of people are living and working in space”; Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to reveal a Mars colonization plan this year.

Image credits: Paul Smith/For the Washington Post; Ramesh Pathania/Mint via Getty Images; Dan Kitwood/Getty Images; Sean Gallup/Getty Images; Brown Bird Design/Foreign Policy