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Hi 👋 

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

January turned the dial way up to 11, huh? My brain, meanwhile, remains stuck in a comfortable 4—maybe 5 on a good day. Work and life have been relentless the past week. Clients seem extremely excited to give out assignments, and the industry news (I work in biotech Media) was extra frantic. Sleep was more difficult to muster, and my sanity was stretched way thinner than I would have wanted. The gym felt like a chore, which only happens when everything else in my life exhausts me.

I’m not whining, though! I wasn’t at peak performance last week (it typically takes me a few weeks to hit my stride), but I’m proud of how I pulled through.

And, very crucially, last week’s longreads kept my brain going. They gave me a really fun way to take breaks from all the thinking and writing that I had to do for work. And so in case someone else is facing a tough week ahead (or just wants a nice mental breather), I’m sharing my most standout reads from last week.

A quick peek:

• Fatal fake news during the fire.

• The train robbery at the turn of the century.

• A serial SWATter and a small-time detective.

📣 QUICK Q: Does anyone here use those bookmarking and article-saving apps like Pocket? I recently returned to Pocket after years away, but things aren’t the same. I don’t mind paywalls for some functions that I like (unlimited highlights, specifically), but the app now can’t seem to download articles off some websites. That’s pretty much a fatal flaw for me. What other alternatives are there that don’t have this issue?

In any case, 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 - This week’s TLR is supported by the Premium Ghostwriting Academy. As a freelance writer myself, I personally look forward to their emails (very informative!) and am looking at some of their programs. They definitely have very high-value offerings that I think can easily help me elevate my own writing business. I just have yet to commit to it, given my workload.

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Story in Spotlight

I chose this story to be this week's spotlight in large part because of how timely it is. (That’s not the only reason, of course—this is a really prescient and well-argued story—but it’s a big part of it).

And on that word: prescient. I feel like it’s both apt, but also a bit too generous. To a scary degree, this story captures the exact same catastrophe that’s blazing all over California right now. That’s impressive at first glance—but then again, scientists and other experts have been warning us for years that something like this was just waiting to happen. Flares like this are on an annual cycle, after all. All it needed was the perfect storm of wind and dry kindling and that one inciting event to spark a historical fire.

And with the climate crisis in full swing, that perfect storm is becoming scarily, increasingly common.

But what really captured me about this article is its focus on the human aspect of wildfires. These crises aren’t simply a product of natural, elemental forces, so the argument goes. Instead, it’s the human-driven need to conquer and conquer and conquer; to push its frontier forward and encroach on pristine natural territories.

And of course, there’s the money behind it all. Real-estate developers, in their perpetual greed and arrogance, insist on bending the natural law to fit the needs of their settlements. So now here we are, decades later, trying and mostly failing to contain one of the most intense conflagrations in recent history.

This is a really smart article. It raises points that can be hard to swallow, especially at this time, but which are important for us to take to heart. (Just a minor, minor gripe: The prose here wasn’t my style at all. I found it hard to follow the sentences and paragraphs, and some of them felt awkward to me. But that’s most likely a personal thing. Don’t let it deter you from reading this).

Not too long. But I found its prose difficult, so it took me way more time than it should have. I think this can reasonably taken down in 30 to 40 minutes, distractions included.

The Longform List

💥 A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza | ProPublica, Free

I’d say that this is, by far, the most important story on this list. Probably the only reason the Malibu story won the spotlight is because of how timely it is.

When the Biden administration steps down, it will leave behind a massive legacy of abetting human rights abuses and denying credible claims of genocide by a critical ally.

Yes, sure, many have argued that its social policies have resulted in the best economic positioning for the U.S. in decades, but in its final year, the Biden government very publicly fumbled its positioning in the Middle East—not only permitting and supplying the most egregious war crime in recent history, but also revealing to everyone that its supposed ideals of democracy and human rights are mostly fake. Standards that it wields only when convenient for itself and its allies.

(That, plus there is a strong sentiment that the economic gains are felt primarily in graphs and not in people’s lives.)

Long, but very, very important. Definitely set aside time for this this week. Maybe 30 to 40 minutes.

👭🏻 The After Dark Bandit | The Atavist Magazine, $

Ah yes. Something from The Atavist finally made it back onto the list.

Which is to say that I’ve finally found the time and brainspace (and need) to commit myself to one of their stories. Of course, that’s not to say that reading through an Atavist story is a chore—quite the opposite, really.

As this piece shows, The Atavist knows how to dive incredibly deep into a story and flesh it out in a really compelling, gripping way. This one, especially, easily kept me hooked with its fiction-esque prose and expert tension-building. It presents a fresh take on crime, where it’s not really the crime or the criminals that drive the story, but it’s their unique circumstance. I’d call this a page-turner if it had pages.

Very, very long. But also very, very riveting. I’d set aside 50 minutes. More if you’re easily distracted.

👮 The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real | WIRED, $

I realized while looking back on this story that WIRED still definitely has it. They might not be as good as they were a few years back, and I may not be completely on-board with some of their features, but man—When they hit their stride, it’s glorious.

This is one of those pieces where WIRED flexes all of its reporting and narrative muscles. The story follows a recluse who, because of things that happened in his childhood, becomes obsessed with a notorious SWATter. In the process, WIRED not only dives deep into the social phenomenon that is SWATting (which in itself is already something that deserves a much more detailed exposition), but also brings to light some crucial institutional weaknesses in law enforcement. Top-notch story.

Very long. But trust me: Well worth your time. I’d say 45 minutes to an hour.

🚂 The Last Train Robbery | Truly*Adventurous, Free

Truly*Adventurous is quickly becoming one of my favorite longform outlets. Probably my current favorite, actually.

This article is pretty emblematic of what Truly*Adventurous is all about: It mines history for some of the most interesting but untold stories—and then researches the f*ck out of it to come up with an arresting narrative. And I know many journalists put a premium on having first-hand account of a story; on actually being there when things happen, or at least seeing where it happened. But I have to say: There’s a certain level of impressive skill required to still be able to conjure extremely detailed scenes using only archival sources.

PS—There’s a twist here that I didn’t expect. Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the story, but it definitely caught me off-guard.

Long and really riveting. Took me 20 very focused, very intense minutes.

🎖️ The Fort Bragg Murders | Rolling Stone, $

I love crime stories like these—those that, on their surface, talk about a murder or a robbery or what have you. But when you dig deeper, the story actually reveals itself to be about something bigger.

In the case of this piece, Rolling Stone uses the murders at Fort Bragg—one of the U.S.’s largest military bases—to unearth gross mismanagement at the site. But then it goes even deeper: About halfway through, the story takes aim at the U.S. government at large, taking shots at how it failed to rehabilitate army veterans, and at how it allows impunity to fester in the ranks of its military leaders, shielding them from any form of accountability.

Very, very long. But I have to be honest: It pressed many of my buttons, so reading it was a breeze for me. I took around 35 minutes, but you might need to set aside more time.

👾 ‘All People Could do was Hope the Nerds Would Fix it’: The Global Panic Over the Millennium Bug, 25 Years On | The Guardian, Free

Hmm. I’ll admit: I felt like this was a pretty milquetoast story. It’s everything that you’d expect from a Guardian story—which is to say that it’s interesting, well-researched, and well-written—but not much more.

Still, this story stands out to me because of how it subtly positions the Millennium Bug not as a technological, computer virus, but as a social phenomenon. The bug, this story argues, was much less lethal than how it was portrayed in the media, and than how it played out in the popular imagination. Ultimately, it’s this mostly conjured, artificial panic that was more of a virus than the actual computer program.

And it makes a really smart point at the end: For better or worse, Gen Z is rediscovering and falling in love with trends from the ‘90s and early aughts. There is a real and strong resurgence of the sensibilities from that time. And it’s important for us to understand how the Millennium Bug panic started and was propagated, so that we’re able to better manage it when it happens again (with AI, I wager).

Long and can honestly feel a bit boring in some spots. Maybe 30 to 40 minutes, distractions included. 

🧠 A Devastating Nerve Disease Stalks a Mountain Village | Knowable Magazine, Free

There’s something about diseases that are exceedingly rare. By definition, they affect a very small number of people. And while they tend to be severe and devastating, so do other common conditions like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

But rare diseases very easily capture the imagination of the media and the general public (and the money of Big Pharma). This story is a case in point. It focuses on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a neuromuscular degenerative disease—which means that patients slowly lose the nerves in their muscles, and they eventually lose control of their limbs. In its most advanced stages, ALS makes it difficult for patients to breathe.

To be fair, the premise of this story is, indeed, very interesting, and not just from a medical standpoint. ALS is very rare. Only around one person per 100,000 live births every year is diagnosed with the disease. But in this remote skiing village, the prevalence of ALS is much, much higher. Scientists work to find out why.

Doctors still don’t completely understand the causes of ALS. But this story—and this phenomenon—moves us at least a step closer.

Not too long, which is unfortunate. I’d have wanted a deeper dive into this. Probably 15 minutes.

🔥 The California Wildfires Just Revealed This Very Grim Truth | Slate, Free

Another very timely story, this time looking at the California fires from a different POV.

And okay: I’ll be the first to admit that I think the misinformation angle is way-too-often misused by the Media, and that it’s typically such a shallow, surface-level way to look at things (maybe that’s for a different edition). But in this case, the analysis to me seems spot-on.

To my eyes, there are very clear culprits for the California wildfires. And while there are some legitimate outlets and observers who write stuff that distract from the most important points of the crisis, that’s not nearly as egregious as some of these kooks who seem to be able to pull the most ridiculous fake news out of their asses. In times of catastrophe—and when it becomes a matter of life and death—deliberate misinformation can become a lethal force.

Not too long. Maybe 10 minutes.

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Until next Monday! 👋