Weekend Reading: Missing Limbs, Missing Brother: The New Yorker What does it mean to lose a limb? The question contains the answer: it is a loss, a disfigurement that disturbs more than most because what is taken is part, literally, of who we are. This is perhaps why the severed leg or arm has become the most-discussed wound of Boston Marathon victims. "They had their limbs blown off, vital arteries severed, bones fractured, flesh torn open by shrapnel or scorched by the blasts" heat," Atul Gawande wrote last week; the limbs come first. As wholeness - not only physical but also emotional, psychological, and communal - is on our minds, it is worth returning to Anil Ananthaswamy's "Do No Harm," a narrative published last November by Matter, one of the more notable innovators putting out magazine-style journalism specifically for the Web and e-readers. Matter's science-oriented stories typically cost ninety-nine cents each, but "Do No Harm," which was its début release, is now free. Ananthaswamy introduces us to a man whome he gives the pseudonym David, and for whom wholeness, as the article's opening sentences make clear, is an affliction of its own: This wasn't the first time that David had tried to amputate his leg. When he was just out of college, he'd tried to do it using a tourniquet fashioned out of an old sock and strong baling twine.... He spent every waking moment imagining freedom from the leg. He'd stand on his "good" leg, trying not to put any weight on the bad one. At home, he'd hop around. While sitting, he'd often push the leg to one side. The leg just wasn't his. "Do No Harm" is the story of David, the leg that isn't his, and his lifelong desire to detach the latter from the former - a story that, with all the up-close intimacy of that opening scene, takes the reader along with David and Ananthaswamy into an Asian hospital where a complicit doctor is willing to do the off-the-books deed. But it is also the story of an entire subculture of people with a similar desire, which is increasingly known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder. In a May cover story for Harper's, "The Way of All Flesh," Ted Conover, in what might be his most ambitious reporting project in more than a decade, goes undercover for two months as a U.S.D.A. meat inspector at a Cargill slaughterhouse and processing plant in rural Nebraska, and he offers up a thoughtful piece that is as much reported essay - on racism, pain, and ethics, among other topics - as exposé. But the article, alas, is behind the magazine's paywall. If you're a subscriber, read it, and if you aren't, consider subscribing - or settle for the Washington Post Magazine's recent article about another dirty and difficult job: spying for Cuba. Of course, you could also opt for David Grann's "The Yankee Comandante," on William Alexander Morgan, the forgotten American hero of the Cuban Revolution. As a former Washington resident - and, full disclosure, former Post food-section columnist - who once got the Sunday Post deposited on my porch, I'm thankful to see something other than the rare Gene Weingarten feature lending heft to what has recently been a fairly waifish weekend magazine. The reporter Jim Popkin tells the tale of Ana Montes, "the most important spy you've never heard of." Arrested in 2001 shortly after 9/11 (and thus hardly written about even at the time), Montes spent seventeen years sending secrets to Havana while simultaneously ascending to positions of importance within the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. The details of her rise and fall are entertaining, but the article's emotional power comes from a bizarre coincidence: Montes's sister, Lucy, one of Popkin's key sources, is a twenty-eight-year F.B.I. veteran who has spent much of her career hunting Cuban spies. But if such escapism does not suit you, perhaps because you're still processing the here-and-now details and themes of last week's events in Boston, you may want to immerse yourself in one of the following articles, each of which addresses, obliquely, some of those details and themes. There is Jordan Conn's February, 2013, profile in ESPN The Magazine of Fauja Singh, who ran his first marathon at the age of eighty-nine, having taken up running to distract himself after the sudden death of one of his sons, and who then began smashing world records for elderly runners, attempting his most meaningful race after his hundredth birthday. There is Naomi Zeveloff's stunning piece in the January 4th issue of the Jewish Daily Forward about the grieving family of six-year-old Newtown victim Noah Pozner, the one article about that tragedy that stands out in my mind months later. And then there is Susan Straight's personal essay in the March/April issue of The Believer. "November 24, 1963: What My Brother Left Behind" is a striking piece of prose about the death of Straight's brother in a truck crash, told in a brittle yet poignant voice and with an attention to the details of everyday rural domesticity that both bring to mind Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping." She paints a reality in which life and death constantly mingle. "My brother was born on November 24, 1963," she begins. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on the twenty-second, and my mother cried so hard she went into labor. The essay evolves into a sort of eulogy: He died ten years ago, when he was thirty-eight. He would be forty-nine today. I do not miss him less than when he died. I miss him the same every day. Here is what he left me: His heavy Levi's jacket, sheepskin lined, with ragged holes in the left side where someone threw battery acid at him.... He left me his Mexican fighting hen named Coco. She is of Chihuahuan extraction. She is twelve years old now.... He left me a tree. My birthday gift seventeen years ago, a tree he raised from a seed the size of a peppercorn... And now he isn't here.