The Week’s Best Longreads: The Daily Beast Picks for December 8, 2012

The Heiress
Ken Aluetta, The New Yorker

The measured rise of Elisabeth Murdoch.

James Bond and the Killer Bag Lady
Mark Ames and Alexander Zaitchick, Salon

New clues and a powerful Wall St. skeptic challenge the official story of CIA financier Nick Deak’s brutal murder.

The Basketball Diaries, Afghanistan
Peretz Partensky, n+1

Playing basketball was one of the last things I thought I would do in Afghanistan. Yet, there I was, in a foreign land, in a barely comprehensible cultural landscape, in a stinky hotel, mediating an inter-ethnic conflict in the guise of a skirmish on the court.

A Bishop Behind Bars
M.L. Nestel and Jebediah Reed, The Daily

An Amish sect leader tells of the beard-cutting that could lock him up for life.

Chris Hughes is About to Turn 100
Carl Swanson, New York

The Facebook co-founder has already served as Mark Zuckerberg’s in-house humanist and Barack Obama’s digital consigliere. Now, in buying the venerable, century-old New Republic, he’s out to prove that a 29-year-old worth $600 million is just the man to make the “life of the mind” scalable.

An Intimidated Victim Testifies
Allison Yarrow, The Daily Beast

A young woman from Brooklyn’s tightly knit Satmar community breaks with it to stand by her allegation that a community elder raped her.

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