Longreads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser] We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. A Bigger Problem Than ISIS? Dexter Filkins | The New Yorker The Mosul Dam is failing. A breach would cause a colossal wave that could kill as many as a million and a half people. --------------------------------------------------------------- On the morning of August 7, 2014, a team of fighters from the Islamic State, riding in pickup trucks and purloined American Humvees, swept out of the Iraqi village of Wana and headed for the Mosul Dam. Two months earlier, isis had captured Mosul, a city of nearly two million people, as part of a ruthless campaign to build a new caliphate in the Middle East. For an occupying force, the dam, twenty-five miles north of Mosul, was an appealing target: it regulates the flow of water to the city, and to millions of Iraqis who live along the Tigris. As the isis invaders approached, they could make out the dam’s four towers, standing over a wide, squat structure that looks like a brutalist mausoleum. Getting closer, they saw a retaining wall that spans the Tigris, rising three hundred and seventy feet from the riverbed and extending nearly two miles from embankment to embankment. Behind it, a reservoir eight miles long holds eleven billion cubic metres of water. [Read More] Future Shock Abraham Riesman | Vulture Director Alfonso Cuarón revisits Children of Men, his overlooked 2006 masterpiece, which might be the most relevant film of 2016. --------------------------------------------------------------- On Christmas day, 2006, a curious twist on the Nativity debuted in a handful of movie theaters. Directed and co-written by Mexican auteur Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men told the story of (decade-old spoiler alert) a near-future dystopia in which women are inexplicably unable to have babies — a state of affairs upended by the advent of a miraculous pregnancy. The film is set in the deteriorating cities and countryside of southeastern England — vividly rendered with alarming realism and minimal use of sci-fi futurism — amid geopolitical chaos that has led to a massive refugee crisis, which has in turn led an immigrant-fearing and authoritarian U.K. to close its borders to outsiders who seek its shores. Terrorist attacks in European capitals are just routine items in the news crawl. The world stands on the brink, and no one has any clear idea of what can be done. The film, in hindsight, seems like a documentary about a future that, in 2016, finally arrived. [Read More] Awake in the Night Robert Sanchez | 5280 Magazine Mary Kuanen escaped the violence of Sudan only to live through her husband’s murder in suburban Denver. Half a decade later, the single mother of five is still working to build the better life she was promised. --------------------------------------------------------------- She awakens in her youngest son’s bed. The glare from the lights outside shine through the small room’s window, casting shadows like tombstones across the walls. Her seven-year-old’s little chest gently rises and falls under the covers. She presses her palms into her eyes and wipes the sleep away, careful not to wake her boy. She silently lifts her head from the pillow and checks the clock on the dresser. The red numbers read 3:00 a.m. In that instant, she feels relief: Youn will be home soon. [Read More] How ‘Deadpool’ Saved Ryan Reynolds Ramin Setoodeh | Variety Ryan Reynolds spent 11 years thinking about what it would feel like to walk in Deadpool’s shoes. So when he finally got to don the red Spandex suit, he’d already worked out the character: His underdog Marvel superhero wouldn’t have Superman’s steely strut but instead would walk with a bounce. “Deadpool is so feminine,” the actor says over soup at a hotel in Bel-Air. “At least in how I saw him.” The trouble was that the stunt doubles had a hard time dropping the macho swagger. “I’d say, ‘When you land, can you sashay away?’” Reynolds laughs. This week, Reynolds’ special gait will be on full display on the red carpet of the Golden Globes. “Deadpool” is the first live-action comic-book movie to score a best-picture nomination in the organization’s 74-year-history, competing in the musical/comedy category. And Reynolds is in the running as a best actor nominee, following a prize at the Critics’ Choice Awards last month. “Not to sound too esoteric,” Reynolds says, “but I really got this guy.” [Read More] Marlene Dietrich’s Marginalia Megan Mayhew Bergman | The New Yorker The actress Marlene Dietrich spent the last ten years of her life bedridden, in her apartment on Avenue Montaigne, in Paris, refusing to see old acquaintances and avoiding photographers. In her biography of Dietrich, her only daughter, Maria Riva, wrote that her mother’s legs “withered. Her hair, chopped short haphazardly in drunken frenzies with cuticle scissors, was painted with dyes.” She surrounded herself with a hot plate, telephone, scotch—and books. She coped with isolation by running up a three-thousand-dollar-a-month phone bill and reading everything from potboilers to the pillars of the Western canon. She consumed poetry, philosophy, novels, biographies, and thrillers—in English, French, and her native tongue, German. When she died, in May, 1992, her grandson Peter Riva was tasked with clearing out nearly two thousand books from her apartment, many of which arrived at the American Library in Paris. [Read More] Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book] This email was sent to [{EMAIL}] [why did I get this?] [unsubscribe from this list] [update subscription preferences] The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA