This weekend’s recommendations both come from The New Yorker:

George Packer enters the privacy-obsessed world that surrounds Laura Poitras, the filmmaker and first collaborator with Edward Snowden. Her new documentary, Citizenfour (which takes its name from Snowden’s first pseudonym) opened on Friday in New York but Packer’s profile takes the reader back to the final few days of editing in Berlin, Germany. Packer writes: From the first e-mail she received from Citizenfour, she disappeared into a world of secrets from which she is only now emerging. “I was sucked into the narrative in a way I have never experienced before,” she said, “and probably will never experience again.”

Patrick Radden Keefe’s stunning reporting and construction carries the reader deep into the underworld of insider trading. Reconstructing the relationships between a doctor with information, a trader looking for leads, and a billionaire (Steven A. Cohen) looking for profit, Radden Keefe’s piece unravels like a novel. I’d include a short quote from the piece, but seriously: just read it.