'I’m not saying I’m incorruptible'

Hi 👋 

Welcome back to The Lazy Reader, where we read some of the best longform stories from across the Web ✨

Writing this from a nice sunny, sandy corner of Asia, trying my best to stay away from the storms ravaging the rest of my backwater country. Forgive me for another very brief intro but I’m way too excited about getting back to the beach and my reading.

Some choice picks from last week:

• GQ Inside the Great Pyongyang Crypto Caper

• The Walrus Fade to Light

• New York Magazine How Carlina White Found Out She Was Kidnapped at Birth

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!

What a truly absurd story about rich, borderline narcissistic people wanting to even richer, even more famous.

This story plays up the China angle a lot, which I guess is… fair? That generates clicks, and there are definitely some genuinely interesting nuggets about the work culture there, and how it differs from the quietly authoritarian nature of Hollywood.

But I think what makes this story truly compelling is the sheer number of money infused throughout it—so much so that everything about this film is outrageously over-the-top. The sets, the costumes, the revolving door of high-profile directors, the script. It’s all crazy.

Another crazy story—this time it’s genuinely because of something Chinese.

In this one far-flung province in the Philippines, a young, pretty Filipino-Chinese woman embedded herself deeply in local politics and ended up becoming the mayor. But behind her rise and power (and money) is a sprawling scam network—the kind that fools people to give up their important details online and siphons money from their victims.

Alice Guo’s story isn’t just one about one crime empire, but also touches on the deep-seated corruption in the Philippines, the culture of patronage politics, and the utter ineptitude of domestic mechanisms to protect its democracy.

If you aren’t aware, China is becoming the world’s leader in biopharma. It’s almost overtaken the U.S.

The problem is that there are still extremely problematic kinks in its system, like this one explored by Science, where a child was given a highly experimental gene therapy that led to her death. It ended up getting buried and swept under the rug. It’s not clear why there was so much silence, but one can surmise that it has to do with the country’s culture of keeping up appearances and tamping down on critique.

I’m not saying these things don’t happen in the U.S. (they do, and probably worse), but there are severe questions of ethics and transparency that China still has to reliably address before it can hope to be a serious challenger in the global stage.

Absolutely chilling. This just feels like an extreme case of personality disorders colliding in the worst and most fatal ways possible. And it’s really scary to think that there are people with these horrific things in their heads and in their lives, just existing all around us.

On a more procedural note, I wouldn’t say that this story treats the tragedy with empathy (which I personally would have wanted to see). But there is an impressive amount of disconnect and impersonality, which I think lends to the overall professional tone of the story. It’s refreshing how the writer doesn’t really put himself in the story. I didn’t realize how much that had been missing from the industry until this story.

This is one of whose what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of articles: A profile of the titular “most prolific war-crimes investigator in history.” That alone is a compelling enough narrative, especially since Mustafa’s most impactful investigations happened under the bloody Assad regime in Syria, which was so obsessed with controlling what people say.

Following Mustafa’s life and work is a massive enough task, which is why the story doesn’t really go beyond that anymore—no broader examination of war crimes and the secrets it must keep to continue its abuses; of how the task of keeping the Assad regime accountable fell to one man; of how international law is so powerless to prevent these crimes. No looking at who will continue Mustafa’s task now that he’s gone.

Pretty low-stakes crime story here. The piece follows a series of book heists from 2022 through 2023, which focused on largely Russian works, particularly by a writer named Alexander Pushkin (he wasn’t very widely read internationally, but is a very massive figure inside Russia).

At times it felt like the article was trying to force it a bit too hard that the Russian government was behind these thefts, especially because the story ends without there being any credible piece of evidence that these were state-sanctioned acts. I think it was a lot of wasted word count that could have instead gone on to some other bigger questions, like the ownership of culturally important items.

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! 👋