The Darkest Day and The Forever War 🪖

Hi 👋 

Welcome to the first official The Lazy Reader themed reading list!

(Which is a weird thing to say, seeing as we’ve been having a couple of these the past few weeks—but those have been sponsored.)

If you’ve been out of the loop, we’re trying something new for The Lazy Reader. On top of our Monday longform lists, we’ll start sending out emails on Thursdays, too, with five or so reading recommendations that fall under a specific category.

This week’s theme, if you haven’t sussed it yet, is about 9/11—The bombings that set off the U.S.’s broad and violent war on terror. In many ways, America’s retaliation (and the world’s tacit approval of it) has set the tone for global geopolitics, which in the years since has become more militarized.

I’m aware that so much has been said about the war on terror, so much so that you might be tired of all of it by now. That’s fair (and feel free to skip this list, if that will help you keep your peace). But the current state of the world right now makes me think that we all need a little bit (or a lot) of reminding of how the only real outcome of war is human suffering.

In any case, the goal is to make these themed reading lists weekly thing, but that might not be possible right away. (Running a newsletter on top of a freelance business is stretching me to my absolute limit). We’ll start with every other week and then hopefully move to a weekly rhythm in a few months’ time.

Of course, this won’t affect our weekly longread rundown on Mondays.

Oh, also, we’re still trying to grow The Lazy Reader! If you enjoy our recommendations, please consider sharing the newsletter to your friends, colleagues and family! 🫶

And let us know, too, what you think of the list this week by voting in the poll below or by answering this short survey below. It’ll help us so much to make The Lazy Reader a better experience for you 🙏

Happy reading!

The Falling Man | Esquire, Free

This is, in my opinion, the quintessential 9/11 longread.

I’m in love with this piece. So much so that when I was starting out in the media (I didn’t go to J-school or anything like that), I read this religiously and deconstructed this obsessively to learn the craft.

So needless to say, I’m very biased toward this story.

Tom Junod (one of the greats, for me) sets out on a mission to identify the man in the iconic 9/11 photo. And considering that he quite literally has nothing else to go off on aside from the picture, that’s quite the tall order. But if you’re an astute reader, you’ll realize fairly quickly that it’s not actually about the man in the photo (though that is an effective anchor for the story).

Instead, Tom’s search becomes sort of an interrogation of how the country dealt with the post-9/11 grief. Why are people who stayed as the towers crumbled labeled as victims or martyrs, while those who chose to jump willfully ignored? Why do we look away from them?

Is America Any Safer? | The Atlantic, $

In the days (maybe even hours) after the bombings, America’s pain was quickly galvanized into rage. This, in turn, gave rise to what is today the world’s most heavily funded and violent security force.

Now, there’s a lot to be said about how the U.S. used 9/11 to turn its military machine outward (believe me, we’ll be talking more about that below). But I think it’s also important to look at how America wields its security apparatus against its own people.

This story does a really good job of fleshing that out. It traces in painstaking detail—sometimes even going minute-for-minute, day-for-day—how lawmakers and other authorities took advantage of the post-9/11 sentiment to greenlight tighter security measures across the country.

It’s fascinating to see how quickly checkpoints and the like were instituted—and how easily the country accepted them.

But then the writer asks something very important: Have these measures actually helped make the country safer? Are they, perhaps, being blind to a very specific type of perpetrator? That’s something that you’re going to have to answer for yourselves.

At War With the Truth | The Washington Post, Free

Provoked by 9/11, the U.S. launched (with the rest of the world’s approval) what would become known as the War on Terror. And it’s under this bloody campaign that America would invade and occupy Afghanistan—ultimately destabilizing the region, arguably beyond salvation.

The first few years of this were glorious, at least in a very patriotic, warlike sense. America quickly gained ground in Afghanistan, and people were loudly cheering. This initial fervor funnelled millions upon millions of dollars into the U.S. war machine—something that military leaders wanted to sustain.

The result, as it turned out, was years of lying and misdirecting Americans to think that they were winning in Afghanistan, when the truth was the exact opposite.

The Washington Post bears that out in this investigation here, revealing that both the Bush and Obama administrations knew full well the true situation on the ground, but refused not only to be frank with Americans, but also to cut their losses and pull out from Afghanistan. They let the war churn on needlessly for years, putting several in grave risk, if not leaving them to die.

And when Biden withdrew the troops in late 2020, it turned out that all those years in the country were so utterly wasted that America hadn’t even left enough infrarstructure to sustain Afghanistan after their soldiers left. The Taliban rose back into power with very little resistance.

Nothing Says "Sorry Our Drones Hit Your Wedding Party" Like $800,000 And Some Guns | Buzzfeed News, Free

America’s anti-terror crusade very quickly spiralled out of control and soon spread to many other countries in the Middle East and Africa.

And despite having the world’s most sophisticated intelligence infrastructure (both according to external observers and by its own boasting), the U.S.’s military exploits became increasingly sloppy.

While sloppy is technically an accurate word to describe America’s bombings, it doesn’t even begin to capture the human suffering that this carelessness has brought. This investigation from Buzzfeed News (RIP🙏) illustrates just one of America’s many, many deadly campaigns under the guise of its war on terror.

This is one of the biggest follies of the Obama administration. Not only did they end up killing so many innocent civilians, they also met the victims’ families with so much arrogance and callousness. Military authorities continued to deny culpability and insisted that they had killed terror targets—despite having no real evidence to show for it.

But they had to know that they were wrong, right? They just didn’t want to admit it publicly. Otherwise, where would the money and weapons (meant as sort of compensation for the deaths, in a very twisted way) have come?

Unfortunately, Buzzfeed News never really got to the bottom of this, but I think the answer is pretty damn clear.

Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart | The New York Times, Free

Just a quick warning upfront: This is a massive story. Even The NYT itself admits that. This remains one of the biggest journalism projects of all time, spanning an entire magazine issue.

It’s exceedingly rare that the most prominent magazine on the planet covers something so extensively that it occupies one whole issue.

Some (unsolicited) reading advice from me: Print this out and tackle this in manageable batches. That’s what I always do whenever I re-read this behemoth. I also keep a running list of who the characters are just so I don’t feel so clueless when I jump back in after a few days off. 

The crisis in the Middle East is far from being the fault of only the U.S., but I think it’s important to to have an honest conversation of how tortured the history of the land is—and how America’s campaign of vengeance for 9/11 has further torn the region into bloody pieces.

I believe, more than anything, this piece just highlights how complex the entire thing is: Terror has no place in modern society, and the 9/11 attacks are unacceptable. It was a terrible act of violence that fell just the tiniest bit shy of a declaration of war.

But then so has been the U.S.’s retaliation. In fact, I (and many other human rights experts) would argue that the revenge was so much worse than the initial offense. Many Americans—who tend to be relatively blind to the terrors of their government—agree, too, that perhaps the invasions and the bombings and the drone strikes and the sanctions have gone too far.

The degree of human suffering has been unbelievable and the world has been irreversibly warped, both physically and geopolitically. The absolute least that we could have done is learn its lessons. But a quick look at the news tells you that, painfully, that isn’t the case at all.

Thanks for reading! Please, please reach out if you have feedback, suggestions, or questions. I know some of the stories I recommend might be behind paywalls, and maybe I can help you with access to those, too!

Until next time!