Last week, at 11:54 p.m. on Monday night, June 13, an e-mail from Jose Antonio Vargas landed in my inbox. “Hi Chris,” Jose wrote. “Hope you are well. Any chance we can chat on the phone tomorrow? It’s rather urgent and personal — and a possible story for you.”I had met Jose only once before, when I took him out for coffee and tried to persuade him to write for the magazine not long after his profile of Mark Zuckerberg was published in The New Yorker. I hadn’t heard from him since. So, to be honest, I didn’t think much of that first e-mail and didn’t expect anything to come of it when I dutifully called Jose the next day. (“Urgent and personal” stories have a way of not panning out.) That’s when things got mysterious.
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