The Week’s Best Longreads: The Daily Beast Picks for Sept. 15, 2012

From Michael Lewis’s six-month sojourn with President Obama to the inside story of a failed coup at the University of Virginia, The Daily Beast picks the best journalism from around the Web this week.

Obama’s Way
Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
Six months with the president.

Anatomy of a Campus Coup
Andrew Rice, The New York Times Magazine  
What does the failed ouster of Teresa Sullivan, the University of Virginia’s president, mean for higher education?

Paddled
Christopher Beam, GQ
Finding his way in Beijing was rough, so Christopher Beam turned to something he was good at—Ping-Pong—to try to assimilate. Then the pre-teen ping-machines gave him a taste of China’s national pastime.

Rising Together
Maria Bustillos, Los Angeles Review of Books
A corrective to the debate over Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men. 

A Philosopher Defends Religion
Thomas Nagel, New York Review of Books

The celebrated New York University philosopher reviews a new book by Christian epistemologist Alvin Plantinga.

The Worst Drug Scandal of All Time  
Roger Williams and Jonathan Stone, Newsweek
The Nazis and thalidomide.

For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.com.