Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform's brand-new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone

The story of Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan only to be captured by the Taliban.

When the stranger unbolted the cell door and whispered for them to hurry, Rahim assumed that somewhere in the prison a fight must have broken out. It was the middle of the night, and normally the heavy metal door remained locked until the morning call to prayer. For the past five months, Rahim had shared this cell, in Kandahar's Sarposa Prison, with five other captured insurgents, two of whom he'd fought alongside in the fiercely contested district of Panjwai. Now, from where they lay on old blankets and cushions on the floor, all five gazed uncertainly at the man standing in their doorway. "We are your friends," the man said. "There is a tunnel over here. Come quickly and get inside it."

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The Netanyahu Paradox

David Margolick, Vanity Fair

A inside look at the Israeli prime minister.

As of early May, when his coalition suddenly and surprisingly swallowed up the largest opposition party, Kadima, Netanyahu now controls 94 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. An Iranian atom bomb may be some time off, but as Yossi Verter writing in Israel's liberal daily, Haaretz, put it, an atom bomb has fallen on Israeli politics. Until elections in the fall of 2013, Netanyahu can now do pretty much what he wants. The question is just what that is, and whether even he knows, for he's proven better at holding power than wielding it.

GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty Images

Susan Berfield, Bloomberg Businessweek

The international battle over 17 tons of coins discovered by an American deep-sea treasure hunting company.

Odyssey, which gave the site the code name Black Swan, first claimed there wasn't enough evidence to prove the coins had been aboard the Mercedes. Then Odyssey argued that even if the shipwreck were the Mercedes, it had not been on a military mission when it sank, and three-quarters of its cargo was commercial. In the fight over the world's richest shipwreck, no judge ever ruled in Odyssey's favor. In February, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has jurisdiction over Florida, declined Odyssey's bid to delay the transfer.

The case, which set a small, high-profile, money-losing public company against governments in both Madrid and Washington, featured WikiLeaks revelations about U.S. diplomatic overtures and art stolen by the Nazis. It drew attention to the possibilities of profiting from deep-sea exploration using sophisticated robotic vehicles. And it convinced the co-founder and chief executive officer of Odyssey, Greg Stemm, that if anything, his company's ambitions were not grand enough.

12NEXT