‘If they killed Wilson, they can kill any one of us.’

Hi 👋 

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

Hopefully I get the send time right this time.

I made an embarrassing mistake last week—I sent the newsletter 12 hours earlier than usual. Sorry for any confusion that might have caused, but also thank you because if the back-end data are to be believed, you guys still showed up! Opens and clicks are approximately average which, for a passion project such as this, is more than what I could ask for.

Anyhoo, some choice picks from last week’s early email, if you happen to have missed it:

• The Economist The Wealth Whisperers Who Save Super-Rich Families From Themselves

• GQ The Unspeakable Choice

•  Fiction: Reactor Magazine If a Digitized Tree Falls

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!

PS - Huge thank you to Masterworks and 1440 Media for supporting this week’s newsletter. Please, please consider clicking their ad links below. It’s free, really easy, and helps me out a ton!

A really, really impressive story from The Atavist—a perfect showing of the magazine’s caliber, I’d say.

The article digs (no pun intended) into the gold rush that’s swept over Colombia, zeroing in on one small town that found itself at the center of a violent storm kicked up by the precious metal. Tracing the country’s economy through drugs and dictators, the story situates the gold boom in history, and in the process explains how power vacuums and enterprising crime rings came to rule the local market.

As with any high-value commodity in a historically exploited community, the gold market quickly turned bloody. The writer takes us through the pivotal moment in the local conflict and then traces the years-long, violent fallout—one that ultimately claimed the life of a beloved town fixture and sent the surrounding communities into a fear-induced state of calamity.

Writing and reporting here are top-notch. The courage of the author to actually embed herself in this town—and repeatedly, at that—is nothing short of heroic. Equally impressive is her ability to arrange all her research into a compelling narrative.

Now, that’s not to say that there weren’t some complaints here. Chiefly, that the writer falls into many of the most obvious typecasting traps. In her desire to take the readers with her to Colombia, she slides into some pretty questionable adjectives. It’s a common mistake, so I guess I understand, but still.

The Invisible City: How a Homeless Man Built a Life Underground | The Guardian, Free

Read this one years ago, and promptly forgot about it. Going through it again felt like a nice nostalgia trip, but also, in a very sad way, made me realize how little things have changed. The material reality for many people remain dire as they did for the man at the center of this story. Arguably, things have gotten even worse. Makes you wonder what these leaders of ours are doing, and how many more of us will be pushed farther underground.

The Costs of America’s EV Dreams | Capital B, Free

I love a story that’s very clear in standing up for the communities and audiences it writes for. And it’s no surprise that Capital B, which explicitly writes for Black America (and Black people more broadly) is brave enough to actually plant its flag on the ground.

This story takes an unforgiving look at the EV boom and accounts not just its environmental toll, but also the suffering it requires of poor Black people in the Democratic Republic of Congo just to get these cars going. Yes, sure, there is a long-term planetary benefit to EVs, but are we willing to absorb its immediate (and maybe even mid-term) costs? And if we are, what does that say about us?

Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection | ProPublica, Free

Another one of those stories that I read a long, long time ago, and which I associate with a more prolific time in my journalism career. So reading it again really made me wish I was writing more than I am now. But I digress.

This is one of the first stories that put ProPublica on my radar. It’s a sweeping investigation of something that very few people talked about at the time, and still few people talk about today. It’s unglamorous and everyone actively wants to ignore it, which makes it the perfect subject for a deep dive. And the writer here pulls it off excellently. This is one of those classic investigative stories that I think should be the standard for any budding journalist.

How Anna Nicole Smith Became America's Punchline | BuzzFeed News, Free

Huh. Interesting how so many of the picks this week come from a very specific time, when the U.S. media landscape was scaldingly liberal and on its way to becoming something of actual, material value to society. Sad to see how far we’ve fallen.

In any case, despite being so obsessed with pop culture and detached to some key on-the-ground realities, BuzzFeed News was one of the better outfits at the time. Its team of investigative journalists and feature writers were so progressive and sharp with how they saw the world, and that translated into their stories. Like this one, where they trace the rises and fall of one of America’s sweethearts. Anna Nicole Smith never really reached the heights of Marilyn Monroe, but she was nevertheless a star to be reckoned with. And her fall from fame is an emblem of how we regard women who are unapologetic about their bodies and their desires and their aspirations.

Gosh I miss BuzzFeed News.

Last Time the Market Was This Expensive, Investors Waited 14 Years to Break Even

In 1999, the S&P 500 peaked. Then it took 14 years to gradually recover by 2013.

Today? Goldman Sachs sounds crazy forecasting 3% returns for 2024 to 2034.

But we’re currently seeing the highest price for the S&P 500 compared to earnings since the dot-com boom.

So, maybe that’s why they’re not alone; Vanguard projects about 5%.

In fact, now just about everything seems priced near all time highs. Equities, gold, crypto, etc.

But billionaires have long diversified a slice of their portfolios with one asset class that is poised to rebound.

It’s post war and contemporary art.

Sounds crazy, but over 70,000 investors have followed suit since 2019—with Masterworks.

You can invest in shares of artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.

24 exits later, results speak for themselves: net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.*

My subscribers can skip the waitlist.

Skip waitlist

_{*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.}

Going to go straight to the point here: This is a well-researched, well-written, and, most importantly, riveting story.

It brings together the glitz of high society, the mystery of missing-persons cases, and the intrigue of high-level political ploys. Almost a perfect blend of these three, I’d say. And for that alone, you should definitely, definitely give this one a go. Even for people like me, who aren’t at all attuned to pop culture (both in China and in the U.S.), the people in this story are so big that a lot of it will still be recognizable.

With that out of the way, I do take heavy issue with the double-standards here—not unlike the prose pitfalls that hound the Atavist story above. The writer talks about China and Chinese society and the Chinese entertainment industry as if it is singularly nefarious and twisted and depraved. As if it is uniquely used as propaganda for governments and militaries.

When the truth is, Hollywood is likely worse. It’s not even a secret at this point that stars use sex a currency to forward their careers, and that the Department of Defense heavily funds many of the biggest blockbuster hits—a clear sign of propagandizing. Kind of riche, too, that these subtle digs at China’s entertainment circles appear in Vanity Fair, of all places. The irony seems to be lost on the writer and the magazine’s editors, though.

Another bone to pick: I had trouble resonating with how the article villainized the Chinese government’s crackdown on its entertainment industry. Now, I want to make it clear that of course I don’t endorse, and I even actively denounce, how the state can legally disappear people. That’s wrong and is a clear breach of human rights. But I don’t understand how cracking down on corruption is a bad thing?

And maybe I’m just being heavily influenced by the current state of the world today—the collapse of global economy, the severe grind of capitalism, the utter failure of democracy to deliver progress to developing countries—but there I felt not a shred of sympathy for all these rich, powerful celebrities as they were being hounded by the central government.

The King of the Ferret Leggers | Outside, $

I love Outside for these types of experiential reported-essay-type pieces that explore some of the weirdest, most fascinating things that this planet (and our collective culture as humans) offers. This one is light-hearted but still impactful, following the titular king of ferret legging, which is this twisted sport of stuffing the mammals down their pants and keeping them there for as long as possible.

Coyote Bros: How Hard-Partying College Kids Became Immigrant Smugglers | Rolling Stone, Free

Unfortunately a timely story from 10 years ago given how immigration has become a flashpoint for the US again. This piece follows a group of partying frat-bro-type young men who figure out that trafficking (poor, desperate) people across the border is a much more lucrative enterprise than keeping a legitimate job. That is, until their entire scheme falls apart.

Interesting format here: Rolling Stone cut this piece up into 11 different pages, instead of putting it all in one super long page. Effective way to keep your content free while also discouraging the use of tools to bypass paywalls. Wonder how this did for them economically…

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Until next Monday! 👋