The candidate’s former prep school classmates recall a bullying incident that still troubles them to this day: 

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

‘It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,’ said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was ‘terrified,’ he said. ‘What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.’

“Mitt Romney’s Prep School Classmates Recall Pranks, But Also Troubling Incidents.” — Jason Horowitz, Washington Post

More #longreads from Horowitz

The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency:

It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters she wrote home, dating from her arrival in Saigon to the week before her death.

The letters offer a glimpse into the life of a young woman supposedly working for the State Department as she launched her career and looked for love amid Vietnam’s escalating violence.

‘Reading these letters,’ said Warren, 65, a retired airline mechanic, who hadn’t looked at them since he was a kid, ‘it’s like I got to know her all over again.’

August 6 1964: Dear Mother, Dad & Warren , I think I’m going to really enjoy working for the State Dept. Security-wise we do have to be careful — but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese Police all over the city.

“Barbara Robbins: A Slain CIA Secretary’s Life and Death.” — Ian Shapira, Washington Post

More #longreads from Ian Shapira

A former research assistant for Bob Woodward is hired to help Ben Bradlee work on another book, and discovers that the former Washington Post managing editor still has unresolved questions from the Watergate era:

Later in the interview, Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage in rendezvous arranged via signals involving flowerpots and newspapers. ‘You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,’ Ben told Barbara.

‘Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’

I read it over a few times to make sure. Did Ben really have doubts about the Deep Throat story, as it had been passed down from newsroom to book to film to history?

“The Red Flag in the Flowerpot.” — Jeff Himmelman, New York magazine

More #longreads from New York magazine

Most attention has been on the Supreme Court fight over The Affordable Care Act’s mandate to expand health insurance to 30 million more Americans. But what’s overshadowed is what the rest of the law is doing to change the business model for health care:

The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality metrics. To earn a bonus, surgeons would, among other things, need to ensure that antibiotics were administered an hour before surgery and halted 24 hours after, reducing the chances of costly complications.

Only three doctors hit the metrics that first month, but their bonuses caught the attention of others. “There was a lot of, ‘Why are those doctors getting more, and I’m not?’” Zucker says. Eight doctors got bonus payments in July; two dozen got them in August. Compliance with certain quality metrics steadily climbed from 89 percent to 98 percent in three months.

“Health Reform at 2: Why American Health Care Will Never Be the Same.” — Sarah Kliff, Washington Post

See more #longreads on health care

When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation:

The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.

“[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,” wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. “As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.” And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. “[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.”

“CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

More from Shapira: “How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Oct. 31, 2011

A family discovers new details about their son’s death in Iraq, and wonders why the U.S. lieutenant responsible was not punished:

A year after Dave Sharrett II died, his parents, Vicki and Dave Sr., were nearly at peace. They had come to accept the Army’s explanation of how it all happened in the “fog of war.” They were confident in the Army’s promises of transparency and accountability for the lieutenant who fired the fatal shot.

Then came the third knock on the door.

After a memorial service for their son at Fort Campbell, Ky., in February 2009, soldiers who fought alongside him paid a surprise visit to the Sharretts. In a cramped room at the Holiday Inn Express, the soldiers used words such as “cover-up” and “lies.” They brought video recordings shot from aircraft high above the chaos that showed how Dave Sharrett II and two other American soldiers were killed.

“David Sharrett’s Family Still Wants Justice for Friendly Fire Death in Iraq.” — Tom Jackman, Washington Post

See also: “The Life and Death of Pvt. Danny Chen.” — Jennifer Gonnerman, New York magazine, Jan. 7, 2012

The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up:

I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.” That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said.

It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but “case officers” — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now.

He looked around. One man got up and left. The rest of us, a little anxious, stayed put.

“What Makes a Perfect Spy Tick?” — Jeff Stein, Washington Post

See also: “The Journalist and the Spies.” — Dexter Filkins, New Yorker, Sept. 19, 2011

Lawrence Egbert, a retired anesthesiologist from Baltimore, has been present for 100 suicides in the last 15 years. But he is more reluctant in his leading role, in contrast to the late Jack Kevorkian:

I ask Egbert how much helium it takes to kill a person. “I don’t know,” he says. He recommends buying 50-liter tanks. “I know we have two tanks, and we run them to zero. Until they stop hissing. … It’s better to have too much than too little.”

I find myself staring at one of the hoods, turning it over and over, trying to comprehend how someone could spend the final moments of life with this thing over his head. I tell Egbert that the hoods make me feel uncomfortable.

He responds in a reed-thin voice, with the manner of a country doctor: “I hope so.”

“The New Public Face of American Assisted Suicide.” — Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post

See also: “After Suicides, a Family’s Journey Toward Grace.” — Joshua Wolfson, Casper Star-Tribune

The story of a woman, the husband she vowed to care for, and the complications about how their relationship changed after his severe brain injury:

On a Saturday morning in the spring of 2010, Page had arranged for Robert to come home from Sunrise for breakfast. She had asked Robert’s brother Will to drive down from Annandale to be with them and sent the girls out for the morning with Allan Ivie, a friend from childhood who had come back into her life. She had consulted with Robert’s doctors and her minister. She cooked up some eggs. She was nervous as she sat down at the big oak table next to her husband of 16 years.

Then she had a conversation with Robert she had never imagined she could have.

“A Family Learns the True Meaning of ‘in Sickness and in Health’.” — Susan Baer, Washington Post

See also: “Love for Wounded Soldier Upon Return from Afghanistan.” — Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2011

At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.

“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

“How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

See more #longreads from The Washington Post