The Week’s Best Longreads: The Daily Beast Picks for April 14, 2012

The Big Book
Chris Jones, Esquire
 
Robert Caro has spent 38 years writing the biography of one man. The fourth volume of that work, like its three predecessors a giant achievement and certain bestseller, is about to be published. But Caro is not done.

Why Noah Went to the Woods
Mark Sundeen, Outside

He was a proud Marine who survived three brutal tours in Iraq and had plans to redeploy with the National Guard. But when 30-year-old Noah Pippin vanished inside Montana’s remote Bob Marshall Wilderness, he left behind a trail of haunting secrets—and a mystery that may never be solved.

The Disconnect
Nathan Heller, The New Yorker

Why are so many Americans living by themselves?

The Camorra Never Sleeps
William Langewiesche, Vanity Fair

For years before they caught him, the Italian police had no idea that Paolo Di Lauro was one of Naples’s most powerful crime bosses, running a drug and counterfeit-goods empire—and responsible for a peace his turf had rarely known. Now they long for the days when he was in charge.

The Crisis in American Walking
Tom Vanderbilt, Slate

How we got off the pedestrian path.

The Devil in Deryl Dedmon
Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek

In a parking lot in Mississippi, he killed a black man with his truck. He's in jail for a hate crime—but his black friends disagree.

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