The Week’s Best Longreads for Jan. 5, 2013

The Rise of DIY Abortions 
Ada Calhoun, The New Republic

Jennie Linn McCormack took pills to end her pregnancy and hid the fetus under her bed. Her case could change the course of abortion law in America.

What’s Inside America’s Banks?
Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger, The Atlantic

A close investigation of the enormous risks that banks may still be hiding—and a blueprint for how to avert another crisis.

A Pickpocket’s Tale
Adam Green, The New Yorker

The spectacular thefts of Apollo Robbins, the magician who tests the limits of the human mind.

George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year
Joel Lovell, The New York Times Magazine

The brutal, beautiful vision of a great American storyteller.

Denmark’s a Prison
Jason Farago, n+1

The hit Danish political drama Borgen doesn’t just hint at what the world we’re moving into looks like. It also suggests—and the ratings intimate that we already know this—that democracy in Europe is becoming a television show.

Eunuchs of the Universe
Tom Wolfe, Newsweek

Twenty-five years after the release of his classic novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe goes back to Wall Street to find out how the world of finance went wrong.

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