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

Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of a war without killing…

In this week’s issue, Raffi Khatchadourian illuminates the history and the contested legacy of a secret Cold War experiment that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers. “The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein,” Khatchadourian writes. Some veterans of the tests believe that they sustained permanent damage. Next year, a San Francisco law firm will bring to trial a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, on behalf of former test subjects. 

After the Second World War, the American government acquired the formulas for Nazi chemical weapons and brought scientists and doctors to the Edgewood Arsenal, a secret Army research facility near the Chesapeake Bay, to study them. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the research gained a new component, as the Army began searching for “compounds that would create the same debilitating mental side effects as nerve gas, but without the lethality.”  

Khatchadourian speaks with Colonel James S. Ketchum, now eighty-one and the most prominent defender of Edgewood, who will presumably be the star witness in the class-action suit. Ketchum, who was involved in human experiments at the arsenal for nearly a decade, eventually becoming the head of the Clinical Research Department, “went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel,” Khatchadourian writes.  Ketchum “insists that there was never any ambiguity about the drug experiments during the recruitment process,” Khatchadourian writes. Even though soldiers were told that they could excuse themselves from an experiment, many felt that they could not back down on a commitment to a superior officer. And the volunteers, after their stay at the arsenal, “were blindly pushed back into the Army at large, with no follow-up care.” 

The Army has determined the “fundamental impracticality” of psychochemical warfare, and has not employed the drugs that were tested at Edgewood in combat. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, “the secret clinical trials are a faint memory,” Khatchadourian writes. “But for some of the surviving test subjects, and the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” For his part, Ketchum tells Khatchadourian, “I struggle with these things. But I have always had the feeling that I am doing more the right thing than the wrong thing, here.” 

Follow this link to read “Operation Delirium”: http://nyr.kr/UjBXFJ

…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)

Tonight, President Barack Obama will deliver the final address of the Democratic National Convention. The New Yorker was one of the first national outlets to take a hard look at Obama, back when the question was whether he could win election to the Senate. Here are eight major New Yorker pieces about the President, from 2004 to the current issue:

“The Candidate,” or how the son of a Kenyan economist became an Illinois Everyman: William Finnegan’s piece from the issue of May 31, 2004, about Obama’s Senate campaign.

Larissa Macfarquhar’s Profile of Obama as he began his campaign for President, which appeared in the issue of May 7, 2007, and won a National Magazine Award. At a time when many people thought of the young Senator as a radical activist, Macfarquhar showed that he had always been, as the piece was titled, a “conciliator.”

“Making It,” Ryan Lizza’s piece from the issue of July 21, 2008, about how Chicago politics shaped Obama.

“The Joshua Generation,” David Remnick’s piece from the issue of November 17, 2008, about how the civil-rights movement laid the groundwork for Obama’s Presidential campaign.

“The Consequentialist,” Ryan Lizza’s piece from the issue of May 2, 2011, about how the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy—and the article that introduced the world to the phrase “leading from behind.”

“The Obama Memos,” Ryan Lizza’s analysis of hundreds of pages of internal White House memos that show Obama grappling with the unpleasant choices of government, from the issue of January 30, 2012.

“The Second Term”: Ryan Lizza asks what Obama would do if reelected, from the issue of June 18th.

“Let’s Be Friends”: In the current issue, Ryan Lizza examines the relationship between Obama and Bill Clinton.

1. Photograph by Martin Schoeller. 2. Photograph by Thomas Dworzak. 3. Photograph by Samantha Appleton. 4. Photograph by Marc PoKempner. 5. Photograph by Luke Sharrett.

This week in the issue, Mark Singer investigates the strange controversy surrounding Kip Litton, a small-town dentist who has allegedly repeatedly cheated in marathons in his piece “Marathon Man”. “Since the early nineties, technology has made it possible to clock runners with precision and to track them at measured intervals,” Singer writes, but Litton, who was on a self-professed mission to complete marathons in under three hours in all fifty states, appears to have exploited the running community’s faith in those systems to fraudulently win, or place in, various races.  Click-through for a summary of Singer’s piece (Subscription Required for full access): http://nyr.kr/Qn86AQ

Also, follow this link to listen to this week’s podcast, in which Mark Singer discusses Kip Litton  and the art of writing about mysterious characters with David Grann: http://nyr.kr/T13Rsf

Springsteen wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, with “your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated.”

In this week’s issue, David Remnick profiles Bruce Springsteen as he embarks on his new world tour.  Remnick talks to Springsteen’s band mates, wife, manager, and others about the musician’s early years, his evolution as an artist, the depression that he struggled with: http://nyr.kr/O1XqzZ

For his piece “The Kingpins,” in this week’s issue, William Finnegan travels to Guadalajara on the eve of Mexico’s Presidential elections, and talks to local journalists, law enforcement, and government officials about the rampant organized crime in the country, and what, if anything, the government is doing to restore safety.  “The six-year Presidency of Felipe Calderón is coming to an end,” Finnegan writes, “and this election can fairly be seen as a referendum on his military-led offensive against drug traffickers, which has cost some fifty thousand lives and left the country psychologically battered”: http://nyr.kr/O1AFBm

In this week’s issue, Jane Mayer profiles Bryan Fischer, the Evangelical host of “Focal Point,” a popular Christian radio talk show, and one of the most vocal opponents of what he calls the “homosexual-rights movement”:

Fischer, who jokes that his “listening audience is more conservative than conservatives,” represents a powerful constituency. Rob Stein, the founder of the Democracy Alliance, a progressive fund-raising group, says that groups like the A.F.A. are part of “the largest, best-organized, most effective, and well-financed special-interest political infrastructure in America.” Julie Ingersoll, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, says that the goal of Christian conservatives such as Fischer is to “shape every aspect of the culture in accordance with Biblical law, including politics.” Though it’s impossible to say how decisive a role this bloc will play in November, Ingersoll notes that, in the 2012 primaries, it “succeeded in pushing the Republican Party far to the right.” She adds, “The campaign that Romney’s had to run is very different from the one he ran four years ago. Who would have thought, for instance, that contraception would be an issue?” In February, Romney expressed opposition to a Senate amendment that would have permitted employers to deny insurance coverage for birth control on religious or moral grounds; after his statement was denounced by religious conservatives, he reversed himself.

Click-through to read Mayer’s piece on how Bryan Fischer is making Mitt Romney more conservative: http://nyr.kr/OePRIO

In February, Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about Dallas Wiens, the first person in the United States to receive a full face transplant. Today at 1 P.M. E.T., Wiens will join Khatchadourian to answer readers’ questions in a live chat.  Click-through to re-read Khatchadourian’s article, and join the discussion! 

Your evening reading from this week’s issue: David Grann writes “The Yankee Comandante,” about a dropout dreamer from the Midwest who helped win Cuba for Castro and played a dangerous game with Hoover’s F.B.I.: http://nyr.kr/JTvmAI