The Final Days

In this sweeping epic for The Atlantic, Franklin Foer chronicles the chaos and casualties of the US’ bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, which took place during August 2021.

Their failings were so apparent that they had a desperate need to explain themselves, but also an impulse to relive moments of drama and pain more intense than any they had experienced in their career.

On his first trip, in 2002, Biden met with Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni in his Kabul office, a shell of a building. Qanuni, an old mujahideen fighter, told him: We really appreciate that you have come here. But Americans have a long history of making promises and then breaking them. And if that happens again, the Afghan people are going to be disappointed.

Every intelligence official watching Kabul was obsessed with the possibility of an attack by ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS‑K, the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State, which dreamed of a new caliphate in Central Asia. As the Taliban stormed across Afghanistan, they unlocked a prison at Bagram Air Base, freeing hardened ISIS‑K adherents. ISIS‑K had been founded by veterans of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban who had broken with their groups, on the grounds that they needed to be replaced by an even more militant vanguard. The intelligence community had been sorting through a roaring river of unmistakable warnings about an imminent assault on the airport.

As the national-security team entered the Situation Room for a morning meeting, it consumed an early, sketchy report of an explosion at one of the gates to HKIA, but it was hard to know if there were any U.S. casualties. Everyone wanted to believe that the United States had escaped unscathed, but everyone had too much experience to believe that. General McKenzie appeared via videoconference in the Situation Room with updates that confirmed the room’s suspicions of American deaths. Biden hung his head and quietly absorbed the reports. In the end, the explosion killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 150 Afghan civilians.

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Why We Fight

A bracing, powerful roundhouse kick of a personal essay that swings between a martial-arts sparring session and a fraught partnership—each brutally taxing in different ways. Spare and blunt, but all the more affecting for it. This is one you’ll be thinking about for days to come.

Pain is easier to bear than anguish, I’ve learned. I poke at the blossoms of purple that splatter my thighs and savor the pain. I’m not alone. We all show off our swollen fingers and compare scars. We reshape our muscles. We rewire our thinking. We’re turning from daughters and nurses and chaplains and wives into warriors.

I imagine the front door swinging open and I stride inside, swollen with confidence, transformed into someone who won’t take shit any longer. A mom who can shield her children from chaos and only let their father’s love filter through. Because he loves them, I know this to my core, as much as he can care for anyone. I don’t yet understand the bruises even love inflicts.

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Chuck Palahniuk Is Not Who You Think He Is

It’s not the first Palahniuk piece you’ve read, but Jonathan Russell Clarks threads a nice line between profile and criticism—steeping himself in the novelist’s oeuvre before meeting with him, then using Palahniuk’s latest book to guide the conversation while also allowing space to bounce his own reads off the man.

When Palahniuk talks about this moment, I sense a real note of resignation in his voice. “That […] scene is the most human scene I’ve ever written,” he says. “But nobody will appreciate that. Nobody will appreciate the pathos of that scene, because they’ll fix on the sort of dirtiness of it.”

He’s hurt. It hurts him that people rarely grasp the emotional punch of his writing, that they aren’t more moved by the grounded feelings and earned catharses of his characters. Readers don’t see how much his own personal anguish and history informs his fiction. But they can’t. They aren’t privy to enough of Palahniuk’s life to make the connections. They’re understandably distracted by the heightened plots and grotesque imagery and lurid themes. The emotions are there, certainly, but sometimes the visceral intensity overpowers the soulful underpinnings.

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Death On The Savage Mountain: What Really Happened On K2, And Why 100 Climbers Stepped Over A Dying Man On Their Way To The Summit

What price would you pay to summit K2, a mountain far more technical and challenging than Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain? Could you literally walk past a dying man in order to get there? This past July 27th, 100 people bypassed Pakistani porter Mohammed Hassan on their way to the summit as he lay dying after a fall. For Insider, Matthew Loh tries to understand.

By the end of the summit window, at least 102 people had conquered K2. All paying climbers would descend the mountain safely, and regroup at base camp.

Mohammad did not.

His death would shake the mountaineering industry in the weeks to come, and eventually make headlines worldwide. The climbers who summited K2 that day were swept into the heart of a bitter debate. Speculation churned as people argued whether a man more than 8,000 meters above sea level could have been saved from the Mountain of Mountains — or whether greed for glory had blinded more than 100 climbers and left Mohammad stranded on the ice.

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Seeking to Solve the Arctic’s Biggest Mystery, They Ended Up Trapped in Ice at the Top of the World

A nail-biter of a yarn about a journey into frozen terrain, in search of evidence of what happened to a British expedition that vanished in 1870:

Our crew of five had left Maine in my sailboat, Polar Sun, more than two months earlier to follow the route of the legendary explorer Sir John Franklin. He’d set off from England in 1845 in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route over the icy top of North America that would open a new trading avenue to the riches of the Far East. But Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, and his crew of 128 men had disappeared. What no one knew at the time was that the ships had become trapped in ice, stranding Franklin and his men deep in the Arctic. None lived to tell what happened, and no detailed written account of their ordeal has been found. This void in the historical record, collectively known as “the Franklin mystery,” has led to more than 170 years of speculation. It has also spawned generations of devoted “Franklinites” obsessed with piecing together the story of how more than a hundred British sailors tried to walk out of one of the most inhospitable wildernesses on Earth.

Over the years, I too had become a Franklinite. With morbid fascination, I read all the books I could find on the subject, imagining myself as a member of the doomed crew, and puzzling over the many unanswered questions: Where was Franklin buried? Where were his logbooks? Did the Inuit try to help the crew? Was it possible that a few of the men almost made it out? In the end, I couldn’t resist the urge to go looking for some of these answers myself and hatched a plan to refit Polar Sun so that I could sail the same waters as the Erebus and the Terror, anchor in the same harbors, and see what they saw. I also hoped to complete the voyage that Franklin never did: to sail from the Atlantic into the mazelike network of straits and bays that makes up the Northwest Passage and emerge on the other side of the continent, off the coast of Alaska.

Now, after nearly 3,000 nautical miles—roughly half the journey—my quest to immerse myself in the Franklin mystery had become a little too real. If Polar Sun were iced in, I could lose her. And even if we somehow made it safely ashore, a rescue here could be difficult. And of course, there was also that polar bear.

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What Is Time For?

Among the numerous benefits ascribed to the new flood of AI software is greater productivity across a wide swatch of industries. Increased content production, faster coding, better data analysis; more more more. To what end? Inevitably, it’s money (a.k.a. “revenue”) and status (primarily for executives) sitting at the end of the rainbow. I can’t think of a better counterpoint to that idea than Zena Hitz’s new piece in Plough exhorting readers to pursue leisure as an end in itself. And not just any kind of leisure—a deeper, more fulfilling version. There are ideas found within that I’ll be returning to again and again. In my down time, of course.

What is leisure, and why is it necessary for human beings? The leisure that I am interested in is not the first thing you may imagine: bingeing Netflix on the couch, lounging at the beach, attending a festive party with friends, or launching yourself from the largest human catapult for the thrill of it. The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life, a place where we rest and restore ourselves in order to go back to work. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life.

Let’s pause and ask ourselves: What parts of our lives seem to be the culminating parts, the days or hours or minutes where we are living life most fully? When do you stop counting the time and become entirely present to what you are doing? What sorts of activities are you engaged in when this takes place?

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How “Chuck Norris Facts” Gave Birth to the Modern Meme

Not exactly surprising: the person who created Chuck Norris Facts was a high school senior at the time. Somewhat more surprising: the person who created Chuck Norris Facts now works in AI research, and is smart, funny, and thoughtful—a (non-Chuck Norris) fact that makes Ryan Hockensmith’s profile much more than a trifle.

The site continued to take off, and he came home from Brown after his first semester still a little baffled by his own creation. He remembers sitting in his parents’ living room one night during the break, watching “Lost” and wondering what was in the hatch, when the phone rang.

“Ian, the phone is for you,” his mom yelled.

“I’m watching something,” Spector said. “I’ll call them back.”

Then she said something that made him forget all about the hatch. “Ian, pick up the phone,” she said. “It’s Chuck Norris’ wife.”

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