It’s not online yet, so you’ll have to buy a copy of Esquire to read it, but Tom Junod’s latest story, The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama, is well worth seeking out — a remarkable fusion of storytelling and argument. Written in the second person, as if addressed directly to Obama himself, it makes the case that Obama has carved out a new doctrine of targeted assassination that will have ripple effects for decades to come. Junod writes like no one else, but in particular, he writes about morality like no one else, with brutal exactness. And this is a story about morality:

Since taking office, you have killed thousands of people identified as terrorists or militants outside the theater of Afghanistan. You have captured and detained one. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are killing instead of capturing — “that’s not even the right question,” says the former administration official, who is familiar with the targeting process. “It’s not at all clear that we’d be sending our people into Yemen to capture the people we’re targeting. But it’s not at all clear that we’d be targeting them if the technology wasn’t so advanced. What’s happening is that we’re using the technology to target people we never would have bothered to capture.”