Hi 👋 

Another Monday, another Lazy Reader reading list! ✨

Not much for me to say here. Was still a bit sick last week from food poisoning, which I think turned into some stomach bug of some sort. But it wasn’t as bad anymore and I didn’t want to just lay in bed not reading. Hence, this list.

The question from last week’s newsletter still stands: Would you be interested in a word game series (a-la Wordle)? Thinking of dipping my toes in that.

In any case, if you missed last week’s list, here are a few choice picks:

• The world’s most notorious space scammer.

• The mental health malady in men.

• Modern romance: A weekend with human-AI couples.

As with last week, 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!

Story in Spotlight

Truly, absolutely horrendous.

But I can’t say I’m surprised. For-profit healthcare will always be about the money first, and the patient experience second… if you’re lucky. Often, the patients and quality of care factor very little in a for-profit hospital’s calculus. They don’t call themselves for-profit for nothing, after all.

And, as this story illustrates, this gets especially egregious for hospitals who explicitly serve low-income communities. It’s easier, in practice, to layer test upon needless test, procedure upon unnecessary procedure on poor patients; easier to over-medicate and over-charge. Ironically, there’s a lot of money to be made in poverty, as many others have shown.

If this sounds especially jaded and pessimistic and defeatist of me, then my apologies. But I’ve seen way too much in my career as a healthcare reporter to believe otherwise.

It’s from that admittedly biased vantage point that I’m recommending you this story. (It might be helpful to know, too, that I’ve also lost much faith in these big international institutions—so there’s that).

This investigation by the ICIJ did a lot to reinforce these beliefs in me. It follows only a couple of cases, but it shows the readers what we need to see: How hundreds of millions of donor dollars are misappropriated to make rich hospital administrators richer, how “private equity” swoops in with false claims to provide services to the needy, how these investors then use World Bank money as business capital with no intent on delivering on their promises, and how all of this destroys the lives of the poor.

And also, how the World Bank seems to employ no real mechanism to audit these projects and ensure that its money achieves its stated goals.

It all seems like a big farce, no?

Long, infuriating. Can be difficult to read if you get emotional over things like these (like I do). I took 1 hour, breathing breaks included.  

The Longform List

In a Warehouse of Horrors, Body Broker Allegedly Kept Human Heads Stacked On His Shelves | Reuters, Free

Reuters is always so good at these big, sprawling investigative projects. This story is just one of a seven-part investigation, which I admit I haven’t completed yet. But this is an incredibly strong open to the series, largely because of how morbid it is.

And I don’t mean morbid in that the crime here involves desecrating dead bodies and keeping heads (among other body parts) in coolers—though there is that. But this story also shows how morbidly inept law enforcement is. And how morbidly easy it is for these unethical, monstrous body brokers to bypass regulations, which are often fragmented and poorly enforced, if they even exist in the first place.

Lots of pain, lots of awfulness to go around in this story.

Nobody Suspected Police Shielded a Killer Until the Dead Man’s Sister Dug In | The Washington Post, $

Speaking of morbid and painful and awful, this story is all of those, plus a heaping dose of infuriating. (This is also part of a series that I have yet to complete, too.)

The writer pulls a smart move toward the start of the story: As a way to explain the shitshow tha't’s about to go down, she tries to elucidate the social structure of this town, noting how everyone knows everyone, especially anyone with influence. This serves to make the police’s actions much more enraging because it shows perfectly how the law and justice are so easily bent to meet personal ends. And how one person’s life is an inconsequential price to pay.

‘People Pay To Be Told Lies’: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Ayahuasca Multinational | The Guardian, Free

Lots of psychedelic stories in the news lately, and this one offers a bit of a contrarian view to what has emerged as an overall positive view of the matter. And while it’s of course unreasonable to generalize this one egregious case of abuse to the whole psychedelic space, it’s still valuable, I think, to keep in mind that these things are entirely possible.

In any case, this story is exceptional, even by The Guardian’s usual standards. Reporting looks really tight and the writing is good, too—it does enough to keep you hooked but not too much that it distracts you from the actual events in the story.

A Doctor Challenged the Opinion of a Powerful Child Abuse Specialist. Then He Lost His Job. | ProPublica, Free

ProPublica is an outlet that primarily interrogates power, and this story is a really good illustration of that. Because unlike other ProPublica stories, which have a clear and undeniable hierarchy of power—say, billion-dollar industries versus grieving patients—this one is less obvious.

There are, essentially, two doctors at the heart of this story, but for some reason, one of them seems to always be favored by hospital administration, while the other, despite lobbying for his patients’ wellbeing, can’t seem to find anyone on his side. This story explores that frustrating dynamic and peels away its layers, looking into what exactly drives this imbalance.

Who is the Bad Neighbor? How a South Tampa Feud Made it to Worldstar | Tampa Bay Times, $

In putting this list together, I realize that this one is out of place thematically, largely because this is a relatively light-hearted, low-stakes story.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a compelling story, because it is. It triggers that morbid fascination in you when yo usee well-to-do people get so caught up in their relatively petty fights. Only in this story, that’s dialed up to the extreme, with two neighbors-from-hell doing the absolute most to piss each other off and hopefully force them to move away.

The Last Hike of David Gimelfarb | Chicago, Free

One of those investigation-slash-essay pieces that tries to shine some new light on an old, obscure crime. Well… not exactly a crime in this case, but a disappearance. And for the most part, I’d say this piece does what it’s supposed to do. It gives what I imagine is a fresh take on the life of David Gimelfarb from the POV of a writer—who early on admits that he eerily, uncomfortably fits the profile of Gimelfarb.

At some point, though, the story rattles off detail after detail about the investigation into his appearance, which felt to me a bit info-dump-y. Like it fell into the trap of sounding like every other True Crime story out there, instead of trying to be its own thing.

Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers? | The New Yorker, $

I have to say: This one was disappointing by The New Yorker standards. That’s partly because the paper has set such a high bar for itself, but it’s also undeniable that this piece has a wide room left for improvement. (Oh and also it’s a book review, so there’s that.) The title, for one, sets a certain expectation and mood, but that’s not what the first half of the story provides. And when the piece does start addressing the issue of lead poisoning, the reader has already been left confused, not to mention exhausted by long paragraphs and a lot of other different tangents.

That said, this piece does wrap up nicely, and it ties everything together in a way that I’d say is satisfying. Can’t help but feel like a longform book review shouldn’t take until the back half before it starts coming together, though.

Bonus!

Doing something a bit different this week with a fiction recommendation.

To be frank, I’ve been thinking for a while now of doing parallel lists of short fiction stories. I just can’t, for the life of me, find enough good sources for this. If you have any leads here, please let me know! (And is this even something you’d want in the first place?)

In any case, this story was… chilling. It doesn’t help that it’s on Esquire and not clearly labelled as a short story, so it’s easy to mistake this for a work of non-fiction. Like a reported essay or something like that.

On its surface, this story is about a rabies-like outbreak. About how deadly it is. About animal safety and staying safe from animals. But it soon becomes sinister and you realize that the main character (and the people around him) are sliding into some deep, twisted waters.

I don’t know how this story will land with you, but for me in particular, after having lived through a handful of election cycles where two distinct factions fought rabidly over what the truth is and who gets to decide what the truth is, this story resonated on a deep level. But I think the genius of the story is in how easy it is to see many different situations in it, how a rabies problem in this fictional community points to such universal themes. Really masterfully done.

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! 👋