'Even if you could imagine your child’s death, why would you?'

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Hi 👋 

We’re back again with another reading list of some of the best longform journalism across the internet ✨

Does anyone else start getting really lazy and lethargic once the end of the year comes into view? It feels like my brain’s been swimming through molasses this past week. I mean this has always been a thing for me, but isn’t October a bit too early? Kind of frustrating, honestly.

(Or maybe I just need a break. Everyone’s been telling me that, anyway.)

In any case, here are some choice picks from last week’s newsletter, if you missed that:

• Outside Magazine On the Hunt for America’s Last Great Treasure

• Seattle Met The Brief, Extraordinary Life of Cody Spafford

• The Guardian ‘Iran Was Our Hogwarts’: My Childhood Between Tehran and Essex 

As always, please let me know what you think of this week’s list by voting in the poll below.

Happy reading and see you again next Monday!

PS - Thanks again to 1440 Media for supporting The Lazy Reader! Please do consider clicking their ad link after the fold below. It’s free, easy, and really helps me out a lot!

Definitely one of the rawest and most emotionally heavy essays I’ve read. And I guess that’s your content warning: This is a painful piece that touches on some potentially triggering themes across parenthood, childhood, and loss. If you’re not in a good place mentally because of any of those, then you might want to skip this.

BUT: If you think you have some bandwidth for it, I highly suggest that you carve out time for this piece this week.

Without revealing too much, this essay is from the point of view of a father after one of her daughter suddenly gets severely ill. Him and his family—his wife, his other daughter—go through a pretty extreme emotional journey.

There’s really not much that I can say here without blunting the emotional effect this will have, so just trust me when I say that it’s going to be very much worth your time.

Uncatchable: The Story of Fugitive George Wright | GQ, $

This story is a really nice way to start your week, I’d say. It’s a nice crime story on its surface, but it goes much deeper. You can very much just focus on its fugitive angle and relish in the unbelievable ways that George Wright managed to avoid arrest and retain his freedom despite having the full force of the American law enforcement system breathing down his neck.

But if you’re looking for something deeper to reflect on, there’s also something for you here. Toward the end, this story raises questions about how we see as a society see justice. Is it a carceral concept that dishes out vengeance? Or is it more rehabilitative? And, when it touches on extradition, the story also has nuggets about U.S. colonialism and how it relates to the sovereignty of other countries.

Really good story overall.

Misplaced Trust | Grist, Free

Grist is such a great re-discovery for me (I used to be an avid reader in the early 2010s). I really missed stories like these, looking at and exposing the capital dimension of the climate crisis. I feel like that’s a lens that’s sorely missing from the current mainstream conversation and coverage surrounding the climate crisis.

In this piece, Grist goes many steps further and ropes in higher education, land, public institutions, and America’s colonial past. And again, that’s not something you see often. In my opinion, land is one of the most fundamental subjects when we try to explain the dystopic, capitalist end-times we’re in now, but it’s unsexy from a media POV—compared with, say, crime or pop culture—which is why you rarely see thoughtful longform pieces about it.

HUGE plus for me: This piece is unflinching in calling out the U.S.’s treatment of its Indigenous People for what it is—a genocide. Many genocides, in fact, over and over again.

The Gangster Prince of Liberia | Details (as republished on Tumblr), Free

RIP Details. Condé Nast is a craphole of a media institution but there’s no denying that they know how to produce incredible longform narratives. This one is a perfect example of that, looking into one of the most blatant and violent examples of colonial violence—AND brought to life by the expert pen of Adam Higginbotham.

There’s so much going on here, but I just want to point your attention to a few: how closely the U.S. is entwined with the state-sponsored abuses in Liberia, how these acts reached extreme levels of brutality, and how none of this is a thing of the past. Liberia is still, to this day, steeped in a culture of fear and impunity, driven not in small part by the legacy of this so-called “gangster prince.”

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I remember this being one of those stories that really solidified The Intercept as a newsroom that can go toe-to-toe with the big, legacy media outlets in terms of longform production.

And it’s easy to see why. This story follows a massive case that, on its surface, seems like a slam dunk for the prosecution. And for years and years and years, that was true. Wendell Lindsey was sent away to prison, and everyone was convinced that he had drowned his daughter.

That is, until this particular investigation, which turned over some rocks and found that the original investigation was so dramatically flawed, and that the prosecution presented such a skewed case against Lindsey. The writer Jordan Smith here dives impressively deeply into the details of the case and lays out the ways in which the evidence that supposedly proved Lindsey’s guilt was shoddy at best—and manufactured at worst.

In many ways, this piece simply follows the archetype of the wrongful conviction story, but doing it to its pinnacle. Really great work from The Intercept here.

The Ballad of Bitcoin Bonnie and Clyde | Vanity Fair, $

Fun, relatively light story about one of the biggest and most public bitcoin heists. Though honestly, aside from the sheer value of the stolen bitcoin—and the fact that this is bitcoin, a relatively new and controversial currency—the crime itself was underwhelming. What made this such a spectacle, I’d argue, is how the criminals were so out there, like they were caricatures of themselves.

Aside: The prose here is a sign of the times. The tone was so distinct to me: this trying-hard-not-to-seem-too-serious sound became extremely popular in 2021 and 2022, perhaps as a way for the industry (and everyone, I’d say) to deal with their angst from the pandemic. I don’t know. I found it grating.

Missionaries Using Secret Audio Devices to Evangelise Brazil’s Isolated Peoples | The Guardian, Free

Capping this week off with something relatively short. Which is unfortunate, really, because this is an investigation that could become massive if given more space and resources. Some religious groups from the U.S. and Brazil are blatantly violating the law by planting these self-sustaining devices to preach to uncontacted or recently contacted Indigenous groups. That’s got to be wrong on so many levels, right? And there has to be something sinister, something darker, behind all of that, right?

This went ultra-viral last week. I have a few social media feeds that I obsessively protect from current affairs (just my tiny escapist corner, you know?) but even there, people were talking about this story. Good for Politico, I guess.

It’s not hard to see why this piece captured the internet. I thought that headline was a bit clickbaity, but it turns out that it’s not. In the worst way imaginable, this chat group by young Republicans is extremely racist and violent and discriminatory, so much so that it makes the article’s title seem tame by comparison.

And I sure hope that for us here at TLR, we can agree that regardless of political leanings, this type of speech is unacceptable. I can understand (and maybe let slide) some crass conversations between friends, but not in official chat groups like these. And not if you’re in some position of public leadership. And definitely not to this degree.

Worse, still, is how many of those in this group chat won’t even admit and apologize for this bullsh*t without qualification. Everyone who even bothered to respond to Politico all slyly tried to downplay how bad this is by saying that it might not even be real, or that it’s just some demolition job. I can’t believe this is where the U.S.’s next political class will come from.

Thanks for reading! Please, please reach out if you have feedback, suggestions, or questions. Alternatively, you can fill out this super quick survey form. I promise it won’t even take five minutes of your time, and it’ll be a HUGE help!

ALSO: I know some of the stories I recommend might be behind paywalls, and maybe I can help you with access to those. Send me a message and let’s see what we can do 😊

Until next Monday! 👋