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.

“Front Runner” by Elisabeth Zerofsky, Harper’s

Marine Le Pen’s campaign to make France great again.

The official seat of the European Parliament is a steel and glass city within a city that spreads out across the Ill River in Strasbourg, France. Completed in 1999, at a cost of about half a billion dollars, the two-million-square-foot structure was conceived as a symbol of the European Union’s postwar utopian vision. In its gleaming vastness, with multiple cylindrical halls that resemble giant gears, the complex calls to mind an ultramodern factory. It is difficult to say what exactly is being produced by the thousands of delegates, aides, and staff who bustle along the building’s elevated oak walkways, but the profusion of Greek and Latin nomenclature (the plenary chamber is called the hémicycle; the visitors’ gallery is the tribune) might lead one to believe that the primary output of the place is democracy.

This impression is not shared by Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party (F.N.), which her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, helped establish four decades ago. In 2014, Marine Le Pen campaigned for a seat in the European parliamentary elections on an unapologetically anti-Europe platform. The F.N. asked to be sent to an institution whose legitimacy it did not accept, and French voters rewarded the party with first place in the election.

“The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut” by Grayson Schaffer, Outside

Lhakpa Sherpa has climbed Everest more than any other woman—and now she’s on the mountain trying for her seventh summit. So why doesn’t anyone know her name?

Lhakpa Sherpa awoke before dawn on a cold Connecticut morning in January 2015 and shuffled into the kitchen of her two-bedroom apartment in West Hartford. The walls were covered in drawings and coloring-book pages of Disney princesses shaded in crayon and pencil by her two daughters, ages 8 and 13. She brewed up a small pot of coffee rather than the milk tea she grew up on in Balakharka, a village in the Makalu region of the Nepalese Himalayas. The apartment was clean, the girls’ toys packed away against the walls, and the building, though older, was more or less in good repair. It seemed secure.

“I’m very sad inside, but I never show people sad,” she said. “I’m all the time happy.” I asked whether she was sure she wanted her story told. She was.

“Death From the Sky” by May Jeong, The Intercept

Searching for Ground Truth in the Kunduz Hospital Bombing.

When the Taliban overran Kunduz last September after a monthlong siege, the northern Afghan city became the first to fall to the insurgency since the war began in 2001. A week earlier, many Kunduz residents had left town to observe Eid al-Adha, the sacrificial feast honoring Abraham’s act of submission to God. The heavy fighting sent the remaining Kunduzis fleeing as dead bodies littered the streets.

On Friday, October 2, the city lay quiet, with just one building lit up against the dark sky. Most other international organizations had evacuated when the fighting began, but the Kunduz Trauma Center run by Médecins Sans Frontières remained open throughout the battle for the city. It was one of the few buildings with a generator. Throughout the week, violence seemed to lap against the walls of the hospital without ever engulfing it. All around the 35,620-square-meter compound, the site of an old cotton factory, fighting ebbed and flowed. Doctors and nurses marked the intensity of battle by the freshly wounded who arrived at the gate. According to MSF, the hospital treated 376 emergency patients between September 28, when the city fell, and October 2.

“The gangsters on England’s doorstep” by Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian

In the bleak flatlands of East Anglia, migrant workers are controlled by criminal gangs, and some are forced to commit crimes to pay off their debts. This is what happens when cheap labour is our only priority.

At 3am outside the BP petrol station in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the January sky was still black, but the solitary garage attendant was already serving migrant workers. By 4.15am, dark and silent figures crossing the town had become a steady flow towards the light of the pumps on Freedom Bridge roundabout.

Summoned by a text late the evening before, they huddled in threes and fours on the edge of the forecourt, waiting for a succession of vehicles that would take them to shifts lasting between 10 and 12 hours, in fields and factories across the region. The mumbled greetings were almost all in Latvian, Russian or Lithuanian. Three old vehicles pulled in to fill up with passengers and petrol, and then set off. Those still waiting shared cigarettes and shifted from foot to foot in the Fenland frost. Not long after, a blue BMW with a Latvian number plate cruised into the station, thumping out a bass track loud enough to shake the ground and wake the whole street. A police patrol car appeared, ran slowly round the roundabout and drove off, back the way it had come.

“How Steel City Became the Front Line in America’s Cyberwar” by Elias Groll, Foreign Policy

Blending gumshoe investigations with high-tech research, Pittsburgh has become a hotbed of the Justice Department’s fight against international hackers.

The portraits of Chinese army officers mounted on poster board stare down from the walls of the FBI’s western Pennsylvania field office.

Though they will probably never see the inside of a courtroom, the five men represent the culmination of arguably the most significant cybercrime investigation to date carried out by federal agents based in Pittsburgh: the case against the People’s Liberation Army hackers who were indicted in 2014 for stealing industry secrets from the computers of major American companies.

Over the last 15 years, Pittsburgh has emerged as a perhaps surprising center of high-profile cybercrime investigations. Down in Washington, FBI Director James Comey complains that encrypted communications and other data advances have resulted in investigations going “dark” as suspects evade the government’s efforts to nab them online.

Photo credit: liewig christian/Corbis via Getty Images; PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP/Getty Images; Andrew Quilty/Foreign Policy; PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images; Ronald Martinez/Getty Images