'Throw toys out a window and scream'

Hi 👋 

Another Monday, another Lazy Reader reading list ✨

Last week turned out to be a relatively bad reading week for me. Took a couple of days away from the Internet and my phone, so I wasn’t really able to go through my usual volume of longform articles. That said, the few that I did read turned out to be incredible hits. So this week’s list might be shorter, but it’s definitely still stacked.

In any case, if you missed last week’s email, here are a few choice picks:

• The Atavist The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang

• WIRED A Boy, His Brain, and a Decades-Long Medical Controversy

• Aeon There are no Psychopaths

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!

One of the best features ProPublica has ever run.

Of late, the publication has built a name for itself as being brave and unapologetically progressive about its reportage, which is something that I respect and love and want to see in more outlets. But there is also a lot of value in investigations that are more subtle in their storytelling and make their points not in direct ways, but instead let the narrative breathe and hope that the point finds it way to the readers’ hearts.

This piece is a perfect example of this latter. For much of the article, the story follows two different threads that aren’t obviously immediately related. In the back fourth of the article, though, the two narratives meet—but even then, not a head-on collision but just the two threads running side-by-side in a tragic, unjust way.

Speaking of tragic: This story starts in some of the most tragic ways imaginable, but then it looks at how crises can forge people to become stronger versions of themselves.

As the title reads: This is a love story. The piece follows two people who were put through the worst life can give, and were brought together by twists of fate—and by sometimes over-eager parents. Inasmuch as this is a story of tragedy and suffering and coming out the other end of it, it’s also a story of how two people can grow and thrive in love, despite their traumas and histories and pain.

The current discourse around the political meltdown of the U.S. has, overwhelmingly, revolved around Donald Trump. That the vagaries of this one man—his greed and corruption and hubris and painful incompetence—have led this great country to ruin and has brought the rest of the world along with it.

But, as this piece argues, that’s just half the story, if that. A more complete look at the U.S.’s history shows that Trump is a logical continuation of the country’s presidential pedigree, and that his policies are more in line with his predecessors more than we care to accept. Before Trump ever became a political reality—and long after he fades away—the U.S. was already and will continue be an imperial force that impedes on other countries’ sovereignty and deny crucial rights to a certain sect of its own people, often resorting to violence to feed its wants.

The writer says it best:

A clarification upfront: This is a republishing of this story, which originally ran on Rolling Stone and is now posted on the author’s blog.

This story chronicles a boy who is the quintessential loser—fat, antisocial, spoiled—with a disability to boot. But he has one thing going for him, which is that he has superhuman hearing. He can hear the series of beeps from a phone and know with complete certainty what number was dialed, and can even use that information to hack into other phone lines. He can even impersonate people after hearing their voices, a skill that’s gotten him into some supposedly secure corporate networks.

But as losers are wont to do, the boy here uses this superpower for nefarious purposes, SWATting people based on false intelligence, among other crimes, leaving a series of borderline terror attacks on random people. When he turned 18, and came within reach of the criminal justice system, his luck ran out.

Incredible feature about how fraught our modern concept of “development” can be. This one resonates particularly strongly with me as I spent a lot of time during my days in uni protesting against many of these development projects that would encroach on Indigenous lands and put Indigenous communities at risk.

I’ve mellowed since then, mostly in the way that being employed drains you of your excess time and energy to care about other people. It’s an insidious machine that leaves us siloed and tired, and helps make our rich overlords even more rich and powerful. But clearly, I still care about this subject deeply. What I’ve come to realize is that struggles closely mirror each other across different communities—and so it should also be easy for us to sympathize with one another and support each other.

Governments and big corporations often try to divide us and pit us against each other, but it’d be much easier for us to band together. Clearly this is all much easier said than done, so much so that it’s been a pipe dream for most of history, but stories like this always fill me with hope.

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! 👋