Weekend Reading: The N.S.A.'s Chief, Seasteading, Reputation Scrubbing: The New Yorker With eerily good timing in light of the Edward Snowden leaks, Wired this month published "The Secret War," a piece by James Bamford on the National Security Agency's Director, Keith Alexander, and the rapid expansion of America's cyber-war infrastructure. Alexander Nazaryan recently wrote about Bamford, who has published four authoritative books on the N.S.A., on Page-Turner. If there's one piece to read now about the N.S.A."s hack-and-destroy offensive capabilities - which are different from its methods for gathering of information - this is probably it. The little-known Alexander, whose haircut is "more schoolboy than boot camp," Bamford writes, is nonetheless "not unlike J. Edgar Hoover." For starters, he oversaw the illegal wiretapping of the Bush era. More important, he has presided over an unprecedented integration of military and intelligence activities, which is perhaps best summed up by the article's account of how the N.S.A."s Stuxnet virus attacked Iran's Natanz nuclear centrifuges. A more utopian vision of the future, held by those who almost certainly despise the kind of government Bamford describes, is on display in Atossa Abrahamian's "Seasteading," in n+1. The piece explores the Californian-libertarian philosophy championed by, among others, the entrepreneur Peter Thiel (and mentioned in George Packer's Profile of him) - in short, the idea that boats and artificial islands, floating in international waters, could serve as tiny, self-sufficient nations. Abrahamian focusses on a temporary seastead called Ephemerisle composed of lashed-together boats and detritus bobbing in a river delta near Sacramento, which is half Burning Man-style party, half social-political experiment. "Residents decorated their decks with banners and flags," she writes, "and tied kayaks and inflatable toys off the sides, giving the overall landscape the cephalopodan quality of raver pants." Abrahamian views the eccentric scene with a witty eye. Here's another image: "Radulovich pulled a small vial of dried algae from his pocket... Between bites of his Continental breakfast, he assured me that the powder, which smelled like fish food, would someday "feed the world."" Wackiness and wit are also present in a piece by the reporter Graeme Wood on "the world of black-ops reputation management" in the latest issue of New York magazine. In it, he attempts to uncover who or what is behind a spate of false-sounding blog posts and Web sites that are clearly meant to sanitize the online profile of a law-breaking college acquaintance. "He was even combining philosophy with philanthropy," Wood writes, "leading the small staff of the website PhilosophyBookReview.com to "bring philosophy writing to underprivileged youth by making it part of nonprofit educational programs in developing nations."" HTML and Web-registry detective work lead Wood to his culprit, but his investigation of the over-all digital reality hinted at by such shenanigans doesn't result in tidy conclusions. "I felt sure that the web of the social-media era had natural immunity to these manipulations," he writes. About the big data web of tomorrow, I'm becoming less sure. A final, and darkly comic, weekend-reading option: Craig Davidson's essay "The Marine Dreamland," from the July/August issue of the Canadian magazine The Walrus. Davidson describes his time as a "trashie" (garbage collector) at Marineland, a Niagara Falls amusement park that resembles a second-tier SeaWorld. It has been beset by scandal - in 2012, former staffers disclosed to the Toronto Star what the newspaper has called "a pattern of neglect that has repeatedly resulted in animal suffering." Davidson's piece concerns a sea lion that died in 1992, and he offers up a memorable account of disposing of its carcass. With a colleague, he hauls it to a walk-in freezer - "it was wet, its hide naturally oily, so it glided rather easily" - where it awaits Big Blue, the faithful garbage truck. The event becomes the basis for a meditation on memory itself: With Marineland's abuses in the news two decades later, could he have embellished his own frequently retold story? Joshua Rothman, writing on Page-Turner this week, also reflects on memory's tricks and distortions. "Memory is enforced through repetition, but many moments exist discretely, unduplicated," Davidson writes. "My recollection of handling the frozen sea lion comes in crystalline flashes," which threaten to dissolve like shards of ice.