"And what about Mr. Berman—this odd, secretive man who frightened away many students, yet retired to a house that former students bought for him? He wasn't mentioned in the Times stories, but he may have been the greatest enigma of all. I talked to more than a hundred alumni, to many teachers who worked with him in the sixties and seventies, and to administrators who dealt with complaints about teachers. Berman stood out for his extraordinary control over boys' lives. Several of his former students have spent decades trying to grasp why they yearned to be close to him, and why they remained silent for so long after, by their accounts, he abused them. 'Berman counted on everyone’s silence,' one of the men who lived with him after graduating from Horace Mann told me. Like some of the others, he asked not to be named. 'He assumed that our own humiliation would keep us quiet,' he said."

"At any given time, roughly 20 to 40 guests are staying long term. Since they pay by the week, they call themselves 'weeklies.' To score the cheap rates, $210 for individuals and slightly more for families, they must pay in advance. Residents sign a form that lists the activities that could get them kicked out (mostly involving drugs) and warns that they won’t get reimbursed if they leave early, no exceptions. Some families stay only for a few weeks, some for months, giving the hotel the feeling of a dormitory. A rotating cast of front-desk clerks sells candy and rations towels and washcloths. Though some of the clerks are kind and helpful, the guests think of them as enforcers, and the clerks tend to treat the weeklies less as customers than as undergraduates stealing toilet paper and sneaking in hot plates."

"Scott tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, 'Since I've had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won't have worry to about this stuff anymore.' It worked; Scott is now on disability.

 

"Scott's dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the mill. If there'd been a mill for Scott to go back to work in, he says, he'd have done that too. But there wasn't a mill, so he went on disability. It wasn't just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path—one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack. When the mill shut down, they all went on disability."

"In 1990, under Western pressure, Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu who had ruled with an iron first for nearly two decades, agreed to share power with other parties. Seeing its chance, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the militant group of Tutsi exiles in Uganda, invaded, igniting long-dormant tensions between Hutu and Tutsi.

 

"Kigeli refused to endorse the RPF's violent tactics, but a Rwandan journalist who interviewed him in Kenya was arrested upon his return to Rwanda on charges of harming state security. Kenya's then-president, Daniel Arap Moi, had close ties to Habyarimana, and Kigeli and Benzinge began to fear for their security.

 

"The United States wouldn't just be safer, they thought; its freedoms of speech would allow them to broadcast Rwanda's plight to the world. They picked up the phone and called the one American they knew: Bill Fisher."

"There are certainly more questions than answers in the case of Tim Danielson, a former American runner who today sits in a San Diego county jail, charged with the 2011 killing of his ex-wife. But that's what makes 'After the Mile' such an intriguing read—and my favorite longread this month. Jeré Longman skillfully alternates between the scene of the tragedy and detailing the life story of the reclusive Danielson, who in 1966 became the second high school athlete to run the mile in under four minutes. Was this another athlete's fall from grace? If so, it was an especially long and slow one. Longman seeks to answer the many questions surrounding the Danielson case, and in doing so produces an excellent piece of journalism on a subject who, long before that fateful day in 2011, was already seen as 'one of American track and field's most enduring mysteries.' We often wonder about the lives of star athletes no longer in the spotlight. We ask, 'where are they now?' Sadly, as in the case of Tim Danielson, far too often the answer is, 'Not in a good place.'"