'Inevitably, inexorably, life was running out'

Hi 👋 

Welcome back to The Lazy Reader, where we round up some of the best longform journalism from across the Web ✨

Sorry that this is a day late. Beehiiv (my newsletter provider) decided to mess with my previously scheduled post. Supremely annoying.

Anyway, nothing much to say here today, only that this is probably the densest list I’ve put together in recent weeks. Enjoy!

Some standouts from last week:

• Rolling Stone The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret

• ProPublica “Digital Colonialism”: U.S. Demands to Access Africans’ Data Raise Privacy, Sovereignty Concerns

• GQ The Real Story of the Hawaiian Missile Crisis

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!

This is, without exaggeration or exception, one of the best stories I’ve ever read.

Scary to think that I almost didn’t bother with it, largely because it’s a sports story and I tend to not enjoy those. But this one goes far, faaar beyond sports. I’d even argue that sports is just a tangent here. At its core, this piece is about passion, dreams, brotherhood, and the pain of being left behind. All of that, mixed in with the mounting dread of preordained disaster.

I’m being deliberately cagey here, because this is one of the very rare cases where the writer successfully builds tension for a satisfying plot twist later on. In journalism—where everything is fact and can easily be looked up online—that’s incredibly difficult to pull off.

All of that to say, this is a work of sheer genius and skill by Wright Thompson, who wraps the entire package up in prose that feels more at home in literary works than in mass media. It’ll take years and a lot of discombobulation before I ever forget this story.

One of the most crucial pieces of context here is that it ran in 2020, and it describes events that happened years earlier.

That’s important because with how much attention Iran has been receiving these days, it’s extremely easy to forget that the U.S. has been waging all forms of warfare on Iran for decades now. Trump lit the fuse, sure, but various administrations over the years and across the political aisle have spent billions of dollars stacking explosive after explosive on top of Iran.

This story focuses on just one man but shows how insidious this campaign is. We always hear about these “foreign” and “adversarial” states—China, Russia, Iran—running sophisticated espionage efforts against the “free world,” but in reality these stalwarts of democracy are just as bad, if not worse.

Massive one here, following a crime and its heartbreaking fallout across decades.

The story starts with a gruesome crime, and arguably follows a series of continued injustices through to the end of the piece. At the heart of all of these is a cast of insanely flawed characters, some of whom were supremely unlucky while others were… well… let’s just say they were guided by malicious righteousness.

This article approaches two hours, so there’s way too much to be drawn from it: The folly of youth, the senselessness of crime, racial biases in law enforcement. The ineptitude and corruption of the U.S. justice system. I think it’s unfair to the story to see it through the lens of just one of those. The piece was a huge undertaking, an end-to-end journalistic process that clearly involved all corners of the Texas Monthly newsroom. It is complex by design and deeply enriching as a result.

I never really took Harper’s as the straitlaced type, and I honestly wouldn’t want the outlet to default to this type of investigative, gumshoe journalism. They excel at cultural critique or the more literary type of non-fiction, and I appreciate that about them.

BUT this story was a really pleasant surprise. For those of us in Asia, the 1MDB scandal is a foundational experience. I don’t live in Malaysia, but 1MDB was such a massive earthquake that shook all corners of the continent. Everyone was affected and it seems everyone knew someone who was involved. It’s mostly been buried in the sands of time now, though, so this story was a welcome reminder (which is a weird thing to say about 1MDB).

It’s also a refreshing take: All the media outfits at the time were so quick to dismiss the scandal as an issue of Third World corruption. That it was those damn selfish Southeast Asians!! Doing damned Southeast Asian things!! But Harper’s here blows that angle wide open. 1MDB wouldn’t have been possible if not for the rich white bankers who wanted in on the scheme—and who wanted to skim some fat off the top to keep for themselves.

Corruption isn’t just a function of the government. There’s also a private domain to it: banks and non-profits willing to participate, VCs looking for some easy returns.

This story probably has one of the easiest hooks ever: A person whom the writer worked with turned out to be one of New York’s most notorious criminals—and offers an exclusive interview.

The piece goes on to hit many of the beats that you’d expect. It talks about living through a difficult childhood, about being a tortured creative, about the insular, cliquish nature of New York’s media circles. Deep into the back half, it even dives into questions about inherent evil, and how darkness consistently paws at our reality, looking for ways to break through. (That last one was the most compelling point to me, and reminded me of so many True Crime stories I read throughout the years.)

But I have to say: This feels like way too much space given to someone who so clearly has no empathy or remorse. The writer himself admits that and confronts that directly at a few points in the story… but I’m still not convinced. Would a Black person be afforded all this space and compassion? Would a Muslim person? Would a refugee? Would a poor person? Would someone from the Third World? It feels like an egregious exercise of privilege—especially since both the writer and his criminal-acquaintance are, relatively, media insiders—and for what? A 10,000-plus-word essay on the evil of man? On the consequences of workplace friction? I’m not sure the payoff was worth it.

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! 👋