The Daily Beast’s Best Longreads, Jan 12-18

The Tragedy of the American MilitaryBy James Fallows, The AtlanticThe American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.

Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea By Maggie Jones, New York Times MagazineNeither Klunder nor Stoker believes international adoption will stop in South Korea any time soon. But ending it is what they want. As Klunder put it, “Our goal is to make ourselves extinct.”

Budd & LeniBy Bruce Handy, Tin HouseThe story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.

The NY Police vs. the MayorBy Michael Greenberg, New York Review of BooksThe killing of two New York City police officers on December 20, 2014, while they sat in their patrol car near a public housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has riven the city in a primal way that we have not seen since the Crown Heights race riots that pitted blacks against Hasidic Jews in 1991.

This Is What Happens When We Lock Children in Solitary ConfinementBy Dana Liebelson, Mother Jones“That place mentally messed me up,” a teen recalls of his 82 days in the hole. “I really wanted to die. I felt hopeless.”

My life under armed guardBy Roberto Saviano, The GuardianFor eight years, the journalist Roberto Saviano has faced constant threat of death for exposing the secrets of the Naples mafia in his book Gomorrah. Is the price of life under armed guard too much for a writer to pay?

‘My Nurses Are Dead, And I Don’t Know If I’m Already Infected.’By Joshua Hammer, MatterHe was a globally renowned expert in tropical diseases, and the hero who ran Sierra Leone’s worst Ebola ward. So why, when he finally fell ill, was he denied the extraordinary treatments that could have saved him?