Read “Kattekoppen,” this week’s fiction by Will Mackin, about one soldier’s experience as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan: http://nyr.kr/15WX5eh In this Q&A, Mackin, who as an officer in the Navy has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, discusses his story, the difficulties of writing about traumatic events, and how he feels about others’ attempts to represent the war in fiction and film: http://nyr.kr/15sjBup

The U.S. once regarded a standing army as a form of tyranny. Now it spends more on defense than all other nations combined. In this week’s issue, Jill Lepore asks, how much military is enough? Read more: http://nyr.kr/Visi5Y

For two decades during the Cold War, the United States Army tested chemical weapons on American soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, a secluded research facility on the Chesapeake Bay. Thousands of men were recruited to volunteer; at the arsenal, they were exposed to chemicals ranging from mustard gas and sarin to LSD and PCP. In the December 17th issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about Colonel James S. Ketchum, who once headed the clinical studies at Edgewood and has become the program’s most prominent defender. In reporting the piece, Khatchadourian obtained hundreds of Army documents and raw scientific data, along with archival films about the human experiments. Some of the material was provided by doctors who worked at the arsenal; some of it was obtained directly from the government, through Freedom of Information Act requests. (These requests were made with the assistance of Betsy Morais, who works on the magazine’s editorial staff.) We have compiled some of that material here, in an online package called “Secrets of Edgewood.” Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/RSZwLo

This week in the magazine, Dexter Filkins writes about the fate of Afghanistan after the U.S. leaves.  Here is a sample of the many ads for the Afghan Army that are being shown around the country. With American support and money, the Afghan government is recruiting and training an enormous force of police and soldiers—about three hundred and fifty thousand men and women—to take over the fight against the Taliban. By the end of 2014, the United States and its allies will be mostly gone. While there will still be some Americans there to help with training, the Afghans will largely be on their own.  Watch the video, and click-through for more on Afghanistan: http://nyr.kr/LSM4Ea

Cartoon of the day. Don’t forget to enter this week’s caption contest: http://nyr.kr/r46had

(Source: newyorker.com)