It has not been a good week for essays, at least not for the ones I've read.  If you've read anything that I've missed, please let me know in the Comments section.

Here is a recycled, but timely, C.J. Chivers piece about the Korengal Valley, and you can read Jeff's post for an update on what's changed since last August.

C.J. Chivers, Esquire - The Long Walk: Afghanistan (and Its Future) as You've Never Seen It

Eight years. Nearly eight years had passed since B-52 strikes and a Northern Alliance offensive had chased the Taliban from power in Kabul and President Bush had spoken triumphantly of American ideals and American power. Nearly four years had passed since the SEALs had died on this mountain, a battle far enough back to have been memorialized in a book. And still the Americans were here, sweeping the same ground, headed toward the wreckage ahead, somewhere up there, in the dark.
Each man silently peered down his dim green cone, breathing deeply, picking his next footstep, walking on.

And in honor of my favorite season, baseball season, getting fully underway, here are a few diamond stories - a new one, a classic, and (The Weekly Reading goes multimedia!) a must-see movie.

Marty Dobrow, ESPNBoston.com - Mixing memory with desire: Lary Hasenfus, a 58-year-old knuckleballer, finds new life on the collegiate mound

 So it was no surprise that when he was sent out to the bullpen, the dugout came alive with chatter: "Now's the time, Larry. Go get 'em, seven. Here we go, Larry, Larry Kid."
Looking like some sepia-toned image from Ken Burns' movie studio, Larry wipes the sweat from his handlebar mustache (a follicular time machine: gray in the middle, reddening as it curls out to the sides). He then swings both of his arms behind him, kicks his right leg in the air and delivers the ball right into the catcher's target.
Larry is raring to go at age 58.

Richard Ben Cramer, Esquire - What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?

He's always first, 8:00 A.M., at the tennis club. He's been up for hours, he's ready. He fidgets, awaiting appearance by some other, any other, man with a racket, where upon Ted bellows, before the newcomer can say hello: "WELL, YOU WANNA PLAY?" Ted's voice normally emanates with gale and force, even at close range. Apologists attribute this to the ear injury that sent him home from Korea and ended his combat flying career. But Ted can speak softly and hear himself fine, if it's only one friend around. The roar with which he speaks in a public place, or to anyone else, has nothing to do with his hearing. It's your hearing he's worried about.

Sugar, Written and Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

Sugar tells the story of a young Dominican baseball player who earns himself a spot in the minor leagues and his struggle to adapt to life in America.  It's shot in the style of a documentary, and, while fictional, is inspired by the true stories of hundreds of Latin youngsters who have come to the U.S. seeking major league glory.  It's as much about the immigrant experience and coming-of-age as it is about baseball, so don't shy away if you aren't a fan.  Just see it - trust me.

    

P.W. Singer, Foreign Policy - Meet the Sims...and Shoot Them

The link between games and war goes all the way back to "boards" scratched onto the back of statues by Assyrian guards almost 3,000 years ago. Three millennia later, as the U.S. military recruits from, and is increasingly led by, a generation raised on Grand Theft Auto, real warfare is taking on the look and feel of a video game, from the aerial drones launching precision strikes at terrorists in remote hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the joystick-controlled robots defusing roadside explosives in Iraq. "The biggest change is that it's gone from being unique to being ubiquitous. It's everywhere now," Mark Sinclair, a staff vice president at military contractor General Dynamics, told a U.S. Navy journal.

Adam Hoschild, Mother Jones - Blood and Treasure

IN 1890, A BEARDED YOUNG POLISH SEAMAN made a trip up the Congo River as a steamboat officer and was appalled by the lust for riches he saw among his fellow Europeans. A decade later he finally got the experience onto paper. "A stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads and brass-wire" flowed into the interior, wrote Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, "and in return came a precious trickle of ivory...The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it."

Eli Saslow, The Washington Post - For a look outside the presidential bubble, Obama reads 10 personal letters each day

Obama read the 10 letters in the folder on Jan. 8, but he responded to only a few. He typically returns five to 15 letters each week, aides said, and he tends to write back most regularly to level-headed critics, military veterans and destitute Americans who maintain their optimism. He gravitates toward messages that "inspire," said Valerie Jarrett, his close friend and adviser, and prefers mail that provides a "counterbalance to business in Washington" and transports him someplace else.
After Obama read Cline's letter, he took out one of his custom-made notecards -- thick slabs of white paper cut to the size of postcards, with the presidential seal embossed at the top.

Donald Morrison, The Financial Times - The Dreyfuss Affair

Dreyfus’s ordeal was the first big test of a modern justice system, and it defined one of the central issues of democracy: should the rule of law be applied consistently, or are there cases in which it should be bent to fit a current crisis or pressing national concern? Even today, hardly a month passes without an alleged misstep of justice somewhere in the world being labelled a “new Dreyfus Affair”. 

Stan Grossfield, The Boston Globe - Cleaned-up Hitter

“I probably smoked two joints, drank about three or four beers, got to the ballpark, took some [amphetamines], took a pain pill, drank a cup of coffee, chewed some tobacco, had a cigarette, and got up to the plate and hit,’’ Carbo said.  The Sox were four outs from elimination against Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in Game 6 when Carbo came off the bench to smash a three-run home run into the center-field bleachers, tying the score at 6-6. The blast set up Carlton Fisk’s arm-waving, 12th-inning walkoff home run for the ages.

Robert Baer, GQ - "A Dagger to the CIA"

Kathy knew that there was a time when only seasoned field operatives were put in charge of places like Khost. Not only would an operative need to have distinguished himself at the Farm; he would've run informants in the field for five years or more before earning such a post. He probably would have done at least one previous tour in a war zone, too. And he would have known the local language, in this case Pashto. Kathy skipped all of this. Imagine a Marine going straight from Parris Island to taking command of a combat battalion in the middle of a war.

T. Christian Miller, Mark Hosenball, and Ron Moreau, Newsweek - "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight"

America has spent more than $6 billion since 2002 in an effort to create an effective Afghan police force, buying weapons, building police academies, and hiring defense contractors to train the recruits—but the program has been a disaster. More than $322 million worth of invoices for police training were approved even though the funds were poorly accounted for, according to a government audit, and fewer than 12 percent of the country's police units are capable of operating on their own.

Paul Romer, Prospect Magazine - For richer, for poorer

Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under.

Jeffrey Gettleman, Foreign Policy - Africa's Forever Wars

I've witnessed up close -- often way too close -- how combat has morphed from soldier vs. soldier (now a rarity in Africa) to soldier vs. civilian. Most of today's African fighters are not rebels with a cause; they're predators. That's why we see stunning atrocities like eastern Congo's rape epidemic, where armed groups in recent years have sexually assaulted hundreds of thousands of women, often so sadistically that the victims are left incontinent for life. What is the military or political objective of ramming an assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Terror has become an end, not just a means.

Steve Coll, The New Yorker (online) - Battlefield Tourist

Another aircraft carried James Gandolfini, star of “The Sopranos.” I was hoping to find him at the elders shura in Marjah, briefing COIN doctrine: “Believe me, we’re gonna take care of you people.”

 

There are few things more intellectually satisfying than a well-executed piece of long-form journalism.  While the days when literary giants like Mailer and Updike were regular contributors are long gone, modern luminaries like Michael Lewis keep the flame alive.  Today we have a wealth of sources; often the problem is knowing where to look.

It is to that cartographic end that I'm starting "The Weekly Reading," a regular update of what I'm reading and what I think is important.  While the focus will, of course, be international relations, I will include pieces from across the spectrum.  In short, if it's good, it's included.

Please use the comments page to add your own recommendations - I'm always looking to expand my academic universe.  Enjoy!

Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker - "The Trafficker"

In the early nineteen-eighties, New York was what Soiles calls a “gateway city.” Heroin and hashish were smuggled from the Middle East to Western Europe and then New York, where they were distributed across the United States. As a young agent, Soiles interrogated smugglers who had been arrested, and many alluded to a Syrian named Monzer al-Kassar. “Everybody we snatched would mention his name,” Soiles recalled. Kassar was the biggest drug trafficker in Europe, they said. There were numerous spellings of the name—Manzer, Mansour, Kazar, Alkassar—but it came up again and again, eventually featuring in more than seventy-five D.E.A. investigations. One of Soiles’s colleagues likened Kassar to Keyser Söze, the mysterious, semi-mythical villain in the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects.”

Michael Crowley, The New Republic - "Our Man in Kabul?"

Fifteen years later, in May 2002, a CIA-operated aerial drone circling near Kabul shot a Hellfire anti-tank missile at a convoy on the ground. The explosion killed several men, but failed to claim its target: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. By then, the Afghan warlord was on Washington’s most-wanted list as a leader of the post-2001 Afghan insurgency. But, eight years later, circumstances have changed once again. The United States is now considering whether it’s time to stop trying to kill Hekmatyar and start negotiating with him--a choice that could have crucial implications for Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan.

See more after the jump