Three Lives, Two Corrupt Detectives, No Justice

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Hi 👋 

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

Last week was super hectic and super tiring, but surprisingly I don’t feel burnt out. Which is pretty good timing, because today’s newsletter comes with a very honest look at burnout as a recent social and class-defined phenomenon. It’s forced me to see my exhaustion and exertion under a different light.

Anyhoo: Maybe the lesson for me is to not take a break from work with more work. And to get out of the house more often.

If you missed last week’s email, here are a few choice picks:

• Anti-government extremists and their messiah.

• Murder on the open seas.

• Butlers, which apparently exist in real-life.

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!

At its core, this story is essentially the same tale of the U.S.’s broken law enforcement system—career officials operating with impunity and without consequences, detectives too lazy or too corrupt to actually do their jobs, and state judiciaries too proud to hold their own accountable.

What makes this piece stand out is how extraordinary its circumstances are. It involves three innocent men put away through the shoddy, twisted work of two investigators. One was even put on death row. They all lost decades of their lives because of this, and it angered me to know that the two detectives have essentially suffered no consequence at all. How is that right?

On a more procedural level: This story is written from the POV of one of the attorneys who helped set one of these men free. It reads sort of like a reported essay, which I’m learning is one of my favorite ways to experience deep narratives like these.

The Killer's Trail | Vanity Fair, $

Really enjoyed this one. It follows one of the biggest (but surprisingly forgotten) high-profile killings that shook even the highest rungs of the socialite circles. That nearly all people involved—not least the victims and the murderer—were gay men makes this all the more interesting. There’s something to be said here, unfortunately, about the impulses not just of the rich and the famous, but also the rich and famous gay men.

Have to say, though, that toward the middle, this started to feel dragging. It was all the characters, I think. Like it was a series of name-drops that didn’t ultimately feel too consequential to the story.

The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’ | The Wall Street Journal, $

I have very complicated thoughts about this one. On one hand, of course I don’t enjoy (nor do I support) the rise of these conspiratorial talking heads, trying to push their unproven, often dangerous theories on people who just don’t know better. On the other: The scientific industry as it were had this coming. It made a bed that encouraged rabid group-think (which, might I add, is antithetical to the entire enterprise of science), careerism, and commodification—now it gets to lie in it.

It Was Already One of Texas’s Strangest Cold Cases. Then a Secretive Figure Appeared. | TexasMonthly, $

Really loved how this story started off. It felt like a True Crime story with so much potential—the mystery at its heart is compelling, and the characters around it (and publicity it generated) felt like strong drivers of a good story. But then midway through it just sort of veered off the story and became about this enigmatic online sleuth who may or may not be an actual criminal justice scholar? The transition felt very abrupt and unexplained, and the entire thing seemed like two separate, very interesting stories jammed into one long article.

There is a worrying trend sweeping across biopharma right now: The increasing (and largely unchecked, unregulated) use of AI. Companies are currently deploying these allegedly intelligent systems to stratify their clinical trial samples, zeroing in on patients who are most likely to benefit from their investigational therapies—and therefore increase the chances of these studies succeeding.

It might seem like a win-win: Businesses don’t have to sink too much money into drugs that fail, and patients get extra effective medicines. But I’m wary. And it's stories like these that inspire my skepticism.

Algorithms are too impersonal, too cold, to calculating for healthcare, a field that I firmly believe should be humane above all. Relying on software for decision-making leaves too many holes for the most vulnerable to fall through, not to mention it usually bakes in some uncalculated bias that discriminates against those who are already discriminated against. This piece does an incredible job at illustrating that.

The Five Families of Feces | The Intelligencer, $

Oh my goodness I enjoyed this one a lot. Business journalism isn’t typically interesting to me, but the poop angle here really carried the story. It helped a lot, too, that the writer was so good at bringing up the drama that comes with competition between businesses, and at highlighting how much of a character Howard is. I wouldn’t say that there’s this grand public interest angle here (like, say, corruption or some big anti-trust scheme), but it’s one hell of a narrative.

The New Neurasthenia | The Baffler, $

After reading this article, I think I’ve come to realize that I like these types of thinkpieces if they’re not excessively long; if they’re not so self-indulgent that they keep on belaboring their point over and over and over again. This one, in my opinion, hits that sweet spot.

Of course, thinkpieces need to make strong points and arguments, too, which this one thankfully does. It takes aim at the concept of burnout and looks at its class dimension, which I think has been largely overlooked. It’s irreverent, which is a plus for me, and draws from interesting sources. Would have wanted some more reportage though, but that doesn’t break the piece for me.

The Myth of Agent 355, the Woman Spy Who Supposedly Helped Win the Revolutionary War | Smithsonian Magazine, Free

Won’t lie: The title here paints the story as something much more gripping, more intriguing than what it actually is. And I wish the piece dug deeper into the story, with some extensive legwork on the part of the writer. With a bit more detail, I think this story could have become much more interesting.

All of that said, it still is an interesting piece of work. Just the spy angle alone is enough, I think, to warrant 10 minutes of your time this week to get through this. There’s also a nice gender dimension at the end (that again, I think could have been explored further) that gives the piece a nice spin.

Forever Prisoners: Were a Father and Son Wrongly Ensnared by America’s War on Terror? | The Guardian, Free

This was a pretty wild ride for me. I mean, I’ve read a lot about the U.S. war on terror and its fallout, but it never fails to floor me that America can just pluck people up from other countries and detain them indefinitely. Imagine if China or Russia did that. Especially egregious to me is, as this piece shows, the arrest and detention of these two men were build on shaky evidence. If I stretch my moral compass to its absolute limit, then maybe I can accept that these men were arrested. Anti-terrorism, sure. But no way should it be moral or ethical or legal or whatever to keep them imprisoned forever.

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Closing out with something a bit different this week with a fiction pick.

It’s very rare for me to find a nice fiction story that’s at about the right length for sharing on the newsletter. Unlike for longform journalism, I pretty much stumble onto these stories by accident. So this is like a treat for me.

The story itself, I really enjoyed. It’s a perfect blend of quirky and creepy, and the writer really has this knack of gradually unfolding the narrative ahead of you to keep you reading. You don’t get to spend a lot of time with the characters, but they’re such big personalities—and the circumstances are so outlandish—that it’s easy to relate to them.

And like with most short stories worth their salt, this one doesn’t give you the answers (which can be jarring to those of us used to journalism). It doesn’t tie things up in a neat package, and it leaves you shell-shocked from what is quite the big bombshell.

Thanks for reading! Please, please reach out if you have feedback, suggestions, or questions.

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! 👋