'The Epstein of the West'

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Hi 👋 

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

Lots of big things lined up for me professionally, outside of running this newsletter. Always thankful for the work opportunities, but that might mean some turbulence for TLR, if things turn hectic. I’ll try my darnedest to not let my day job affect this passion project, of course, but just giving everyone a heads-up just in case.

Anyhoo: Some choice picks from last week’s newsletter:

• Harper’s Magazine The Goon Squad

• MacLean’s A Killer Among Them

• ProPublica In the “Wild West” of Outpatient Vascular Care, Doctors Can Reap Huge Payments as Patients Risk Life and Limb

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!

PS - Thanks to 1440 Media and The Code for sponsoring this week’s newsletter! Please, please consider clicking their ad links below. It’s free, easy, and helps me out a lot!

A truly crazy story, but unfortunately one that’s become all too recognizable these days.

Here, The San Francisco Standard follows the case of one rich and well-connected man who has some very twisted sexual proclivities and abusive tendencies. His ex, Emilia London, alleges that for months, she was forced to have sex with several men in exchange for money, that Mickey Gerold then took for himself.

Owing to his status and money, Gerold seems to enjoy a certain egregious level of immunity from consequences—so much so that people call him the Epstein of the West. And what a timely moniker, too, given the recent release of the Epstein files.

Depressingly, however, in the same way that the people in the Epstein files have remained mostly untouchable (even if the emails reveal, in black-and-white, extremely heinous things that they’ve done), it’s unlikely that London will get the justice that she deserves. Gerold is of the same class as these Epstein people. And they all seem to be above the U.S. justice system.

A Brutal Sex Trade Built for American Soldiers | The New York Times, $

This is one of those stories just shows you how brutal empire-building can get. And how certain types of people are seen as lesser than others by default. South Korea is today one of the U.S.’s most stalwart allies, which makes the country so willing to bury the story of these women, to turn away from their truths and dismiss them as nuisances. And that’s also why so many people in South Korea see the suffering of these women as necessary sacrifices for the U.S.’s military friendship.

But I think, if anything, there should be more focus on these types of stories, so we’re able to see the current orientation of the world for what it truly is.

The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion | The New Yorker, $

This story went mega-viral recently, and for really good reasons: It’s a crazy premise that was reported to perfection, and written excellently. Here, a Chinese man moves to the U.S. in chase of the American dream (and more accurately, to escape the anti-corruption policies of his government back home). Through a series of legal loopholes and truly twisted thinking, he amasses contracts a small army of unwitting surrogate mothers and amasses dozens of children.

The U.S. government is then left to figure out if this was a shady human trafficking enterprise or just one man’s perverted concept of legacy.

(Also: It’s mentioned in passing here but it’s also just as interesting that many of the world's wealthiest men have started their own respective projects of spawning more and more children. Someone needs to look into that.)

Inside the Secret Smear Machine That’s Targeting Hollywood | The Hollywood Reporter, Free

If you’ve ever seen some of those viral Tiktoks or tweets about different artists, feeling like they’re trying too hard to grab your attention or sway your opinion, it’s likely that those are part of a coordinated smear campaign organized by the group that this piece follows. THR here does a great job of really digging into the operations of this so-called smear machine, and anchoring it to some very public spats that are bound to be recognizable to the reader.

A nitpick: While I enjoyed the references here that I (as someone who knows nothing about mainstream pop culture) recognized, I feel like the investigation could have gone deeper? There’s a part here where one lawyer speaks out against the PR firm behind this machinery, only to later be revealed that she had also previously sought out the group’s help.

That could have been a great opportunity to dig deeper into just how webbed this entire thing is and potentially even hit at some foundational truths about Hollywood.

The Death of an Adjunct | The Atlantic, $

Really, really beautiful piece from The Atlantic. I won’t lie: I didn’t expect this story to be as compelling as it was. No offense to the higher education and academia circles, but those things just aren’t sexy to me. I was just looking for something relatively short to read on my commute home.

But wow. This was a heartfelt and honest look at how it feels like to have your labor marginalized. How much suffering results from having your work exploited by an impenetrable upper-class that you can’t ever hope to join. I’m sure that, even if this is hyper-specific to academia, many people will be able to relate to the struggles here, especially given how difficult the economy has been recently.

The Horse, the Drone and the Epic Fight for Gambling Success | WIRED, $

I always enjoy these low-stakes stories that, for one reason or another, manage to hold your attention and make you care about whatever it is that they’re about, at least for the duration of the article. In this case, it’s horse-racing and how bettors and gambling houses are locked in this arms-race of sorts to get the most timely video out.

The people at the center of this story have turned to drones, which they use to capture the races as they happen, removing whatever latency there is when a footage is beamed to a satellite before it reaches your internet feeds or whatever. What ensues is a fun push-and-pull between those who want to crack down on drones for fear that it might ruin an industry, and those who won’t be told no.

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This is such a heartbreaking and infuriating story. It shows you just how destructive the white savior mentality is, and how much pain colonial and imperial sensitivities can deal to people.

This story revolves around an Afghan baby girl, who lost her parents and all her siblings in a bloody bombing in a warzone. Under Afghan law and custom, she should have gone to her next-of-kin. Which makes sense, right? You’d think any orphaned infant should be sent to their closest blood family, especially if that family has expressed nothing but desire to raise them as properly and as lovingly as possible.

But for whatever reason, this U.S. Marine just decides that the baby should belong to him, thousands of miles away, in a completely new culture that she doesn’t recognize. And he goes against not just the embassy but also the Foreign Affairs Department, exploiting some weird legal loopholes, to essentially kidnap the baby.

The degree of hubris here is astounding. So much so that I at first didn’t even believe that this actually happened. But Googling it today makes things much worse—Mast and his family continue to keep the baby, and her blood relatives continue to be denied any legal recourse.

The AP story points to a very skewed and dysfunctional justice system that enables these types of foreign abduction, and lets the Americans who commit them get away with no consequences. This next one, also from The San Francisco Standard, tells a similar tale.

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Until next Monday! 👋