9 Feature Stories You Can't Miss This Week: Roots, Rivals, And Revolutionaries

In 2011, at age 23, Egypt's "singer for the revolution" was widely credited with helping to overthrow a dictator. Four years later, a brutal military crackdown has all but destroyed the country's youthful protest movement. Meanwhile, its hero is biding his time in a faraway country undergoing its own right-wing uprising, wondering how — or if — he can still help the cause. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Marco Flores was just nine years old when a neighbor in his East Boston neighborhood began sexually abusing him. Maria Cramer discovers how, after years of suffering in silence, Flores took matters into his own hands — and radically reinterpreted what it means to be a victim. Read it at The Boston Globe.

Leah Palmer was a high-flying fashionista with a jet-setting lifestyle and a host of admirers on social media. But, as Patrick Smith finds, her entire existence was a fraud – a multiyear hoax that depended on stealing someone else’s life. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Greg Nichols chronicles how the competition for business between Dawn DaLuise and Gabriel Suarez, two Hollywood aestheticians, turned very, very ugly. After being deluged with a slew of increasingly graphic and harassing behavior, was DaLuise's idea to "take Gabriel out" an offhand comment, or an indication of a much more sinister plan by a woman who'd had enough? Read it at Los Angeles Magazine.

With global seafood populations plummeting, Tim Zimmermann dives deep into a question that has plagued many socially conscious foodies: Is there a sustainable way to eat fish? "Not only might fish offer the best, and least ecologically damaging, solution to global food insecurity in a flesh-eating world, but some seafood is now produced so efficiently that even a vegan might be tempted to rethink his absolutist vows." Read it at Outside.

Michelle Dean, who attended daycare with monkeys for two years as part of a university study, examines the ethics of using kids as research subjects. "If someone had asked me, at two, if I wanted to play with monkeys, I’m sure there would have been no image of danger in my mind and I would’ve happily consented. But it was really up to my parents to agree for me." Read it at The Verge.

Brit Bennett deftly explores the history and significance of Addy, one of the Pleasant Company's widely beloved American Girl dolls, whose back-story is that of a young slave girl. "If a doll exists on the border between person and thing, what does it mean to own a doll that represents an enslaved child who once existed on that same border?" Read it at The Paris Review.

Robert Lacey gives the definitive history of the fashion industry's most influential modeling agency: Ford Models. Its founders, Eileen and Gerald Ford, were newlyweds in their early 20s when they began to "pave the way for the emergence of multi-millionaire supermodels." Read it at Vanity Fair.

Anna Dushime was only five when her father was killed in the 1994 Rwanda genocide against the Tutsi. In this moving essay, she reflects on his time alive — and how those memories are getting harder to hold onto. Read it at BuzzFeed Ideas.