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Hi 👋
Another Monday, another Lazy Reader reading list! ✨
Is 2026 starting to heat up for anyone else? Or is it just me?
The industry I work in isn’t waiting around this year. Things got frantic right as the calendar changed. I’m not complaining—more work is good!—but my golly it’s given me no chance to warm up from taking a couple of weeks off. And it’s about to get even crazier, too, because there’s this massive industry-wide trade even happening next week. Sort of like the starting gunfire for us.
Anyhoo: TLR will persist! I’ll have these lists out to you as best I can, as regularly as I can.
If you missed last week’s email, here are a few choice picks:
As always, please let me know what you think of the list this week by voting in the poll below.
Happy reading and see you again next Monday!
PS - Thanks to beehiiv and 1440 Media for sponsoring this week’s newsletter! Please do consider clicking their ad link below. It’s free, easy and helps me out a lot. Thank you!
At one point, this story gave me chills.
WIRED here follows the enduring saga of Perplex City, which, aside from being a genius name, turned out to be a really gripping alternate reality game, sending its players on a worldwide hunt for a cube. But outside of this main objective, Perplex City also came with game cards—sort of side quests that players could do. One such card asked them to find a man called Satoshi with nothing but his name and a grainy picture to go off of.
As it turned out, this card would spawn more than a decades’ worth of effort from searchers all over the world, with the hunt spanning across different eras of the Internet. Part of the story argues that advancements in cyber technologies helped accelerate the search for Satoshi—and I definitely agree. But I think a big part of it was also a series of small, miraculous coincidences that brought Hall (the woman at the center of this entire thing) closer and closer to her target. That’s where the chills came from.
The chills are a testament, too, to how well the writer executed the story. This isn’t a complicated matter by any means (some technical stuff about network physics, noting crazy), but the degree of research and skill needed to make the story sing was really obvious here.
Her Mental Health Treatment Was Helping. That’s Why Insurance Cut Off Her Coverage. | ProPublica, Free
There’s something twisted about punishing a patient (and their doctors) for receiving treatment that actually works. That’s what happened here, when Blue Cross decided that one patient wasn’t severely depressed anymore and therefore no longer deserved payment coverage for her treatment. Never mind that her doctors and therapists still agree that she needs continued intervention.
No other way to describe the US healthcare system rather than a clusterfuck in crisis.
The New Generation of Online Culture Curators | The New Yorker, $
Might be blowing some smoke up my ass here a bit. I liked this essay for the very obvious reason that I, myself, am a content curator. That’s the entire point behind, TLR, after all: I go through dozens of longform stories on a weekly basis and pick out those that I—and hopefully you—find most interesting. I started this entire thing as an accountability project for myself, but now I see that it’s also been a huge help to other people who share my interests and want to get into reading, too.
Meltdown | GQ, $
I’ve been seeing talk of nuclear energy on my timelines again. I don’t know what triggered this recent resurgence, though, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I do know that it reminded me of this story from GQ, which in many ways was way ahead of its time in how it looked at our psychological and social resistance to nuclear energy, and how this doesn’t really square with the science.
A not-so-small gripe: This story very blatantly leans toward one side of the argument. And while I understand the urge to plant your flag, so to speak, the way this article does that is a bit too much. It had me questioning its basic journalistic principles, at least.
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Maclean’s was a really wonderful discovery for me over the holidays. I have no idea how I missed such a prolific publisher of longform stories.
This story, from 2024, is a perfect example of Maclean’s journalistic acuity. The piece starts off incredibly strong, with one of the most gripping depictions of terrorist violence that I’ve read in months. It effectively sets the stakes for the rest of the piece, which admittedly significantly slows down as it follows the fallout from the incel attack. Much of the story, in fact, is dedicated to the legal proceedings around the assault, sorting through the thorniness of litigating a minor for a crime that Canada (at the time) had yet to conclusively define as terrorism.
All of this hand-wringing tiptoes around a critical point: That there is very clearly a racial and class dimension to what the courts define as terrorism, which is a big factor as to why the killer here wasn’t immediately branded as a terrorist, not just by the legal system but also by the public.
Could the writer have been more direct and heavy-handed with that particular talking point? Sure. I’d have appreciated that, and it would have made for a more socially relevant story. But I accept that there are editorial barriers that often stand in the way of the pieces that we want to write. Still an excellent piece of journalism overall.
Half-Safe | The Atavist, $
In true Atavist fashion, this story is a broad, sweeping narrative that spans years and, quite literally, the entire world. Chasing after whatever lofty ideal of adventure there is, a couple goes on a quest to drive their way around the globe. Yes, that includes sailing their car (which, to be fair, had been retrofitted to be aquatic—but still) across angry, stormy oceans and braving the most treacherous roads.
But adventure often sounds much more glamorous than it actually is—that’s a big point that this story tries to make. The couple’s relationship goes through the wringer here, and the for a payoff that, ultimately, doesn’t seem all that worth it.
The Big Business of Breast Cancer | Marie Claire, Free
Another health story (I’ve been finding the US healthcare system very fascinating recently-—but for all the wrong reasons), but this time from the opposite side. And to no one’s shock, even the so-called non-profits and allegedly patient-centric organizations are also shady. This piece looks at how many of these misleadingly named groups raise money from well-meaning donors, but then using the earnings to line their pocket. Very few, if any, of those dollars go toward their stated philanthropic missions.
Murder-Suicide Case Shows OpenAI Selectively Hides Data After Users Die | Ars Technica, Free
If you weren’t spooked by AI before…
There’s a lot that’s messed up with this story, but I think what really stuck with me is how ChatGPT just completely fed into the delusions of this obviously mentally unwell man, and even pushed him toward violence. And of course, amid all of these, the companies will not only pay their way out of accountability, they’ll also continue to extol the alleged benefits of AI.
Story gets graphic. Tread carefully.
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Until next Monday! 👋
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