Longreads

Picks this week from Mother Jones, Slate, Grantland, The Washington Post, Film Comment, The Paris Review, and a guest pick by The Boston Globe's Baxter Holmes.

We asked Washington Post reporter Dan Zak how he stumbled upon “The Prophets of Oak Ridge.” Here’s his account.

Three peace activists—one of whom was an 82-year-old nun—penetrated a U.S. nuclear-weapons facility. The story of what happened to the trio, and those involved in the incident:

"When told that Sister Megan thinks he saved her life by not escalating the situation — that, in fact, he was her salvation — Kirk is speechless. His wife is not.

"'That’s amazing that she’d make that kind of statement,' scoffs Joann Garland. 'She is safe — because of him — to be able to go and do what she’s doing. . . . The joke of it is they came in God’s name. God does not say to break laws. Sorry. God does not say that.'"

A Medicare experiment is facing possible shutdown, despite its proven effectiveness. The secret? It's nurses making frequent house calls to those with chronic diseases:

"But Health Quality Partners, with its emphasis on continuous nurse-to-patient contact, did work. Of the 15 programs, four improved patient outcomes without increasing costs. Only HQP improved patient outcomes while cutting costs. So Medicare extended it again and again — now it’s the only program still running under the demo. But Medicare has notified Coburn that it intends to end HQP’s funding in June.

"Medicare’s official explanation is carefully bureaucratic. 'The authority that CMS had to conduct this specific demonstration, which predated the health care law, did not allow us to make the program permanent and limited our ability to expand it further,' says Emma Sandoe, a spokeswoman for the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services. 'As we design new models and demonstrations, we are integrating lessons from this experience into those designs.'"

Our favorite stories of the past week, from The New Republic, NPR, Washington Post, New England Review, Modern Farmer, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and a guest pick by Jon Tayler

How a U.S. intelligence analyst ended up spying for Cuba for 17 years—all while surrounded by family members who also worked for the FBI:

"Montes must have seemed a godsend. She was a leftist with a soft spot for bullied nations. She was bilingual and had dazzled her DOJ supervisors with her ambition and smarts. But most important, she had top-secret security clearance and was on the inside. 'I hadn’t thought about actually doing anything until I was propositioned,' Montes would later admit to investigators. The Cubans, she revealed, 'tried to appeal to my conviction that what I was doing was right.'"

A case of international parental kidnapping, and a mother's fight to get her daughter back:

"To make the plan work, Homaune had to take on a new persona in conversations with her ex-husband. She tried to be calm, helpful and understanding, and mailed him just enough cash, medicine and clothes to keep him interested in a more lucrative rendezvous. She stopped haranguing and screaming, even when her husband threatened to send her daughter home in a 'box' or to sell her on the black market, statements he would later admit he made.

"After the most intense calls, Homaune sobbed or threw up. But she refused to stop calling Iran; a key part of the plan involved being in constant contact, wearing him down, taking his demands seriously and convincing him that they were still friends, no matter what."

A mother and son from Virginia are kidnapped by terrorists while visiting the Philippines. The story of their escape:

"Every 15 minutes, all night long, the men would shine a bright light inside, checking on the captives.

"Because the militants wouldn’t use names — they called Kevin 'the boy' and Gerfa 'the woman' or 'the infidel' — and never revealed their own, the captives began assigning names to them. Gerfa chose names of parasites that make people sick. 'The first one I called Enterobius vermicularis,' — pinworm.' Another, Falciparum, or malaria. Another was Entamoebas, which cause things like dysentery.

"But her cousin had trouble pronouncing the Latin, so they switched to simpler names. One man had a beard, so Kevin called him Hagrid. Others became Skunk, Tom and Jerry, Pancake and Band-Aid."

We're excited to introduce this new recurring series, in which we work with publishers to dig up notable stories from their archives that were previously unpublished on the web. We're especially excited to kick this off with The Washington Post. 

Today's piece is "The Spy Who's Been Left in the Cold," a 1998 Washington Post Magazine story by Peter Perl, who just announced he's retiring from the paper after 32 years.