'Jalapeños don’t belong in okonomiyaki'

Hi 👋 

Another Monday, another Lazy Reader longform reading list ✨

Keeping the intro brief again this week! I always have trouble figuring out what to put here. I’m not a rambler. If anyone has ideas about what I could be putting here, I’m all ears!

Anyhoo. Some choice picks from last week’s email, if you missed that:

• GQ The Life Changing Magic of Raising Peacocks

• Tampa Bay Times Big Banks Entrusted Money to GardaWorld. It Secretly Lost Track of Millions.

• TexasMonthly The Girl, the Con Man, and the Massage Parlor King 

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!

All week long I was craving a sprawling longform story that I could lose myself in. Those winding narrative types that are unapologetic in how deep they go, and that don’t hold your hand through it.

This article was the last story to make it onto this week’s email, and it was an immediate lead. The Atavist always delivers.

Writer Jordan Michael Smith here follows a criminal informant who was able to take advantage of one FBI agent’s ambitions for a more prestigious and more exciting assignment. The result was catastrophic. Under the cover of the FBI, the CI was able to defraud, intimidate_, and even kill several people—and at many turns he was protected by his handler, who refused to believe that he had made the wrong call years earlier.

It’s a crazy tale of high-level incompetence, arrogance, and violence. Perfect commute buddy, I’d say.

R&K is doing so much with the food genre that some of the biggest legacy outlets, with all their influence and money and supposed expertise, can’t even dream of achieving.

This is a piece about food as a universal language, which is an awful premise—largely because of how cheesy and amorphous it is. Not something you’d typically want to anchor your narrative on. But somehow it works here, so much so that this has become one of my top food pieces of all time.

The story follows a chef from Guatemala who, through a series of twists of fate, found himself training to be an okonomiyaki chef in Hiroshima, learning not just the trade but also the dish’s history as a cultural staple that helped rebuild the city’s identity after it was annihilated by America. And when it comes time for him to strike out on his own (with the full support of his mentor, of course!), it’s influence from his birthplace that helps set his restaurant apart.

For better or worse, I’m always so needlessly sensitive about food and culture. This story was refreshing. It was respectful in how it regarded food as something that was clearly historically important to Hiroshima. The chef at the heart of the story is also so graceful about his adoptive country and mindful to strictly root his fusion okonomiyaki in the traditional dish. It’s such a good story.

This story is from a largely bygone era of journalism where deep and brave investigative pieces were common. I miss it so much. I recent years, it feels like only ProPublica has been carrying this torch forward. But I digress.

Tampa Bay Times here takes on a giant in the medical and healthcare industry: Johns Hopkins. The hospital is well-known globally as a leading care provider, and people from all over the world pay exorbitant amounts of cash to get treated at Hopkins. But, as this investigation shows, the prestige doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny.

After being acquired by Hopkins, the standard of care at All Children’s, a pediatric clinic in Florida, took a nosedive. Deaths, even from the most routine surgeries, skyrocketed and became the highest in the area. This story looks at what the hell happened. (Spoilers: Some doctors with poor management experience think they’re the best and won’t be told otherwise.)

Another one on the U.S. criminal justice system, which I’m learning (not the least from all these longform stories) is such a clusterfuck.

There is a violent and depraved crime at the start of this story, followed by an even more violent and depraved miscarriage of justice. And there are also two Black men with the same name. The writer does incredible work here, revisiting the murder and doing the job that law enforcement failed to do, which is check with the all witnesses, exhaust all leads, and, most importantly, presume that your suspect is innocent until proven otherwise.

The result is a damning look at the U.S. criminal justice system. There is overwhelming evidence that the man in prison didn’t commit the crime, and yet he remained in prison and had very little chance of freedom. At least at the time of the story. He was set free in 2022, after losing 30 years of his life to this gross injustice.

Inside My Days as a Content Bot | Esquire, Free

Interesting essay about the early Internet: What content and influencing meant then, and how these things have morphed—or I would argue, how they’ve been warped—over the years. Content (such a boring word) is now taken as the basic unit of whatever nonsense we upload online, and influencing is a mainstream career that (some) people proudly wear as badges or tout as clear professional achievements.

But back then, the act of creating content was much more deliberate and not as accessible as it is today. People with money and power used it to quite literally influence the public’s perception of them, trying to push scandals and other bad press away from the mainstream. Come to think of it: These things still ring true today. But a lot has changed. This essay tries to interrogate that.

Big Food, Big Problems | Cipher Magazine, Free

This is a good primer on how a handful of the world’s largest companies (most if not all are in the U.S.) have all but completely captured our food systems. They create an illusion of choice, but in truth, the profits all just flow upward to a tiny group of executives and their shareholders. Interesting how the trickle-down model of wealth is a myth, but it seems that trickle-up isn’t.

I say that this is a primer because it isn’t as long as it could have been, which is probably its intent anyway. There’s way too much to parse through here, but this story gives readers a good jump-off point.

A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat | WIRED, $

Solid investigation into how massive lobby groups and businesses (and by extension, their cronies in the U.S. government) are pouring ungodly amounts of money into influencer campaigns to demonize China’s tech boom. For a country that allegedly puts a heavy premium on personal liberties and democracy, this is very hypocritical, to say the absolute least.

My only nitpick is that there is such a deeper history of U.S. monied interests bankrolling these nefarious propaganda campaigns against other countries—often with devastating real-life outcomes for people in those countries. I feel like this story should have at least touched on that history.

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! 👋