– Qué bien escribe Hernán Casciari y qué historia increíble. El cuento de Navidad perfecto. En Revista Orsai: Lo que le pasó al hombre que me salvó la vida. Al argentino le dio un infarto mientras estaba en Uruguay, en una casa de alquiler. Lo que pasó, antes y después, os hará recuperar la espernaza.

El ingeniero. El estafador de los mil nombres. Historión también de Rafa Méndez en El Confidencial sobre Enrique Irazabal, alias Henry Hughes, alias Luis Rivera, alias Luis Braun, alias Josef Guzman, alias Roberto Urrutia, alias Heuk Labazh, alias José Goicoechea, alias Henry Hellinger, alias Carlos Suárez, alias Equirne Labazari.

– Brett Forrest en el Wall Street Journal (puede pedir suscripción): The FBI Lost Our Son. Billy Reilly worked in counterterrorism for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, penetrating radical groups online with false identities. Then he disappeared. Sobre cómo después del 11S las agencias norteamericnas reclutaron a ciudadanos para que se infiltraran en organizaciones peligrosas, pero sin darles el entrenamiento y las compensaciones de sus agentes.

– Stuart A. Thompson y Charlie Warze en el NYT: Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero PrivacyTwelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy.  Bastante inquietante. No muy inquitante, y no muy aterrador, porque está asimilado. One nation, tracked An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry from Times Opinion.

– También en el NYT, esto de John Ismay: America’s Dark History of Killing Its Own Troops With Cluster Munition. The weapons are notorious for their effects on civilians. But five years of reporting and hundreds of interviews have revealed they’ve also killed and wounded scores of Americans.

– Elizabeth van Brocklin en The Trace: Lockdown. Living through the era of school shootings, one drill at a time. Ojo al inicio: «Ninety-five percent of American schools now conduct drills to prepare students for a school shooter».

– Nick Pachelli en Searchlight, una publicación de investigación de Nuevo México: «Stolen and Erased A Navajo girl was exploited and sex trafficked in urban and rural New Mexico. Why did so many fail to help her?

– Pamela Colloff en Pro Publica y el NYTMagazine: How a Con Man’s Wild Testimony Sent Dozens to Jail, and 4 to Death Row. El artículo es disparatdamente largo, más de 13.00 palabras sobre Paul Skalnik un delincuente muy particular. Now a man may be executed because of his dubious testimony. Why did prosecutors rely on him as an informant?

– Alexander Wynne, en Aeon: A Prince or a Pauper: Who was the Buddha? When we strip away the myths, such as his princely youth in a palace, a surprising picture of this enigmatic sage emerges.

– Dan Shipper en SuperOrganizes hace un perfil/charla con la persona detrás de The Browser, del que salen cada semana algunas de estas recomendaciones: The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day How Robert Cottrell finds the absolute best writing on the web.

– Philip Pullman en Public Domain: The Sound and the Story Exploring the World of Paradise Lost. Un ensayo precioso. John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been many things to many people — a Christian epic, a comment on the English Civil War, the epitome of poetic ambiguity — but it is first of all a pleasure to read. Drawing on sources as varied as Wordsworth, Hitchcock, and Conan Doyle, author Philip Pullman considers the sonic beauty and expert storytelling of Milton’s masterpiece, and the influence it has had on his own work. Una idea destacada: «A poem is not a lecture; a story is not an argument. The way poems and stories work on our minds is not by logic, but by their capacity to enchant, to excite, to move, to inspire. To be sure, a sound intellectual underpinning helps the work to stand up under intellectual questioning, as Paradise Lost certainly does; but its primary influence is on the imagination».

Buen domingo y muy feliz Navidad a todos