'I see everyone as a potential predator'

Hi 👋 

Kicking off another week with The Lazy Reader and some of the best longform journalism from across the Web ✨

Anyone else feeling extra frustrated with the media lately? Maybe I’ve just been too “woke,” as the kids say, but mainstream news has felt flaccid lately. It feels like journalism as an enterprise has been so scared lately, failing to focus on the news that actually matters to its readers, instead lending its pages to monied interests.

No wonder trust in us is at an all-time low.

If you missed last week’s email, some standouts:

• The Walrus Minding the Monster

• The New York Times A Secret History of Psychosis 

• California Sunday The Contestant

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!

Starting this week off with a story that is timely and also extremely disturbing. This is your content warning: Please take care when reading this, and feel free to skip if you think this will trigger you.

Not all men, but somehow always a man. And I say this as a man. This investigation by CNN—which, as an aside, is an incredible work of online journalism and shows that the Internet can be a really powerful tool for the press—uncovers a truly perverse corner of the cyberspace, where men admit to drugging their wives and partners and then film themselves sexually assaulting them. For the consumption and entertainment of other men. Incredibly depraved.

And it speaks volumes that the moment this story went viral online, there was strong pushback against it, trying to temper people’s rage and claiming that it’s not actually as bad as it seems: It’s just a tiny slice of that particular porn site! There aren’t nearly as many men on it than the story makes it seem! This is all blown out of proportion!

Those are all part of the problem, too.

Another timely one for this week, but this one is shorter than our usual fare. But that doesn’t mean it’s no less important or hard-hitting.

I’ve always believed that the U.S. and Israel’s aggression in West Asia (as with all wars) has been driven in large part by money. There seems to be consensus online that Trump is a massive idiot and doesn’t know what he’s doing in Iran. I don’t disagree, but I also think that that’s not a useful viewpoint to hold—we’d all be better equipped to understand the conflict (and hopefully find a way out of it) if we saw it as part of an overall strategy to intentionally sow confusion and tank the markets so that they’re easier to manipulate.

Stories like these back my conviction. This one in particular focuses on betting markets, but I think there’s much more to dig and uncover in the stock market. Hopefully some skilled journalist is actually looking at the noise and considering it as part of a larger political maneuver from the U.S. government.

I’m finding out that I also have a weak spot for maritime stories. And across that entire subgenre, this one stands out as among the classics.

Part of what makes this story compelling is that it tiptoes around a massive blind spot, which you’ll understand once you read it. And as a reporter myself, I know that working around such a massive unknown forces you to be creative in finding ways to piece your story together. This article does that and goes far beyond: The storytelling was expertly executed, so much so that I didn’t really notice until a second readthrough that there were big write-arounds.

The narrative itself is also gripping, and more than once I found myself gasping out loud, much to the annoyance of the person beside me on the treadmill.

I’ll be honest: I expected much more from this story when I picked it out, and the setup was good enough to not just maintain but also raise the bar. And for a while, it seemed like the story was meeting these expectations that it set up for itself, but then somewhere along the way things started falling by the wayside.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a good story that’s still very much worth your time. The piece doesn’t just look at Madoff as this singular swindler, nor does it focus on his scam—there have been enough of articles like those. Instead, the story zooms out a bit and looks at the circles that Madoff moved in. His victims: The people and organizations that fell for his lure and lost their life’s savings. The writer presents a deeply nuanced and complex picture of (as the title says) Madoff’s world.

That said, I do think the fact that it’s so long worked against it, which isn’t something I usually say about longform stories. At some point, all the talk about wealth and money starts to feel overly gratuitous, and then it feels dragging. I enjoy myself a nice, interesting story about the super wealthy, but this one got old.

So much of food writing these days has been trapped in recipes and essays and blogs. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that (well… except with food essays, most of which I find vapid). But there’s also so much more that the genre can do.

R&K as an outlet has been putting in so much work in that regard—and with travel writing, too, which has likewise become mostly shallow—and this story is a good emblem of that effort. The piece follows a chef who not only inherited his family’s love for food but also its disdain for the mafia. What follows is a one-man resistance against one of the world’s most powerful crime families.

A nitpick: A setup like that does raise your expectations. And I’d be lying if I said that I was a bit let down with how the story turned out. I was looking for more drama, more cinema, more suspense. And I think there was truly much more that could have been drawn out from this entire thing. Still, that doesn’t mean this is a bad story. And the mere fact that a small outlet can execute a food story much better than the legacy pubs out there is already cause for praise.

I won’t be holding back here. So we should probably get the easy things out of the way. Prose was, as expected of GQ, clean. Structuring was smart, word choices kept the reader hooked, and the cadence made it easy to stay on the story.

Which is just as well, because the reporting here was… thin. This read like very poorly concealed military propaganda. It couches its (very light, almost negligible) criticism of the CIA leadership in what is at times an all-out and unabashed adoration of the agency. An agency, by the way, that has a deep and documented and publicly available history of undermining democracies abroad, overthrowing governments, supporting actual terror groups, among many other espionage activities.

Speaking of espionage: This story gets very confusing and inconsistent when it comes to spycraft. The main person in this piece is himself a CIA agent and he’s given a lot of respect and adoration. (He openly admits to having spent years in Afghanistan. As far as I’m concerned, that’s an immediate red flag that would have disqualified a source, just from the sheer level of conflict of interest). Meanwhile, espionage efforts from other countries are treated as outright evil or even acts of aggression. Yes, sure, they’re adversarial countries, but we can try and feign balance, right?

And I haven’t even got to the question of Havana syndrome, which itself is a contentious subject. We don’t even know if it exists. And perhaps more to the point: You’re telling me that the world’s most powerful military establishment and most well-resourced spy agency can’t work out the science behind Havana syndrome? I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that the CIA is this big bumbling fool groping around in the dark while the agencies of Russia and Cuba (!!!) are painted as these evil villains with tech that we can’t quite understand.

I don’t know what happened to GQ here but the holes in this story are crazy.

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! 👋