Eep. A month off from these. Not that I haven’t been reading, but I’ve just not made time on Saturdays to write these. That’s my one trick with these; the other is that I power this with Instapaper.

• The Torture Colony covers a Germanic colony inside of Chile that Pinochet used for torturing folks. This is just a crazy read.
• Todd Marinovich: The Man Who Never Was covers the title subject’s entire arc, from crib to crisis.
• Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis — and 15 covers a teen who openly manipulated the stock market. Sure, this is from 2001, but you can look forward from this to see folks like Jim Cramer, et al, who manipulate the market themselves.
• How Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me Is Crowdsourcing Done Right is a fun piece by Derek Powazek, who knows a thing or two about Internet community and crowdsourcing, talking about the NPR program and how it brings in a variety of voices.
• Lincoln’s Great Depression covers Lincoln’s melancholy and how it drove him—and arguing that it made him the great that he was.
• Mother Earth, Mother Board is a fantastic trip into the laying of the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe, from Lord Kelvin’s inventions to what it took around the turn of the past century to lay subsea cabling.
• Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs covers what I think of as mental steroids. I want to say that I’d never take these, but I (ab)use caffeine, so …