From next week’s issue, online now: Marc Fisher uncovers the story of Horace Mann English teacher Robert Berman, who enthralled his favorite students with talk of poetry and art, but now stands accused of sexually abusing some of them. One alleged victim tells Fisher, “People think of child abuse as a moment in a shower, like Sandusky. They don’t think of it as essentially abducting and brainwashing. This was a cult of art, literature, and music…”

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/13jmmRp

  In this week’s issue, William Finnegan writes about Gina Rinehart, Australia’s mining tycoon and the richest woman in the world in 2012: “Australia used to be considered a land of equal opportunity. But, now, Gina Rinehart poses a direct threat to its egalitarian tradition…” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/16vjQ9t

(Source: newyorker.com)

David Remnick reports from Moscow on the recent acid attack on the Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director, Sergei Filin: “The ballet company has always uncannily embodied the society to which it belongs: imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and, now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia…” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/12HWJJO

Photograph by Misha Friedman.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Aaron Swartz was brilliant and beloved. But the people who knew him best saw a darker side. 

In this week’s issue, Larissa MacFarquhar looks at the various events that led to Internet activist Aaron Swartz’s suicide earlier this year, through interviews with those closest to Swartz, including his parents and girlfriend at the time. Since his death, “his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes,” MacFarquhar writes. “They have done this because it is what he would have wanted.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/YEO7ei

(Source: newyorker.com)

In this week’s issue, Ryan Lizza asks if Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader, can redeem his party and himself: http://nyr.kr/159MMST What do you think? Can the leadership of the House of Representatives transform the GOP?

Photograph by Christopher Morris.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In this week’s issue, Michael Specter profiles Dr. Mehmet Oz, and looks at some of the controversial ideas that he entertains on his show: “Much of the advice Oz offers is sensible, and is rooted solidly in scientific literature,” Specter writes. “That is why the rest of what he does is so hard to understand…

“…Oz has been criticized by scientists for relying on flimsy or incomplete data, distorting the results, and wielding his vast influence in ways that threaten the health of anyone who watches his show.”

Click-through to read “The Operator”: http://nyr.kr/W5c2Y0

Photograph by Ethan Levitas.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In the Jan. 28, 2013 issue, Paige Williams looks at the black market for fossils, and talks exclusively to Eric and Amanda Prokopi, whose curious trade in Mongolian dinosaur fossils has landed them at the center of an extraordinary legal case:

United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton went to court in early September, in lower Manhattan, with U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel presiding. Castel has adjudicated cases involving accused mobsters (John Gotti, Jr.) and cases involving rappers (Kanye West) but never one with a party from the late Cretaceous. “I stand to be educated,” he said. “I’m not going to claim that I have dinosaur arrests presented to me with any frequency…”

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/UBWZ5T

“Zero Dark Thirty” is two and a half hours long; in real life, the hunt for Osama bin Laden lasted for nine and a half years. Here are four fact-filled pieces from The New Yorker’s archives to help you fill in the gaps… http://nyr.kr/V7wwyp

…he also knew that his old self’s habits were of no use anymore. He was a new self now. He was the person in the eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of “Satanic Verses,” a title that had been subtly distorted by the omission of the initial “The.” “The Satanic Verses” was a novel. “Satanic Verses” were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author. How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight…

In this exclusive excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s forthcoming memoir, “Joseph Anton” (about his life in seclusion after the Iranian head of state, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his murder), Rushdie writes about the inspiration for “The Satanic Verses,” his thinking when working on the book, and his reaction to the anger among Muslims after its publication. Click-through to read the excerpt: http://nyr.kr/NZYSnz

(PHOTOGRAPH: “Salman Rushdie, London, England, September 26, 1994”/© 1994 The Richard Avedon Foundation)