'Winning streaks turn cold.'

Hi 👋 

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

Last week was rough: Came down with a bad illness, was extra swamped at work, phoned it in at the gym. Plus for whatever reason, the longreads weren’t hitting as much. More than usual, the articles that I finished were… meh. I’m not sure if I just ran into a particularly boring stretch of articles or if I wasn’t in the right headspace to be digesting longform.

In any case, here we are at the start of another week. Hopefully this one turns out to be kinder!

Some choice picks from the previous newsletter:

• Current Affairs The Iran War Is Unfathomably Depraved

• ProPublica Documents Reveal a Web of Financial Ties Between Trump Officials and the Industries They Help Regulate

• GQ When a Psychic Reading Costs You $740,000

As always, please let me know what you think of the list this week by voting in the poll below. And if you enjoy these weekly reads, please spread the word and let your friends and family know!

Happy reading and see you again next Monday!

Sometimes a good story is just a good story—no need for some grand moral lesson, no need to hit at some universal truth. Just plain, riveting narrative.

That’s the case here, in what I’d say is one of Truly*Adventurous’ best works ever. The piece follows the life of a top corporate executive who is consumed by greed and pride, and whose consumerist lifestyle—not to mention the recession—gets the best of him. (Hey I didn’t say there weren’t any big life lessons here; just that it didn’t need any).

When the winds of fortune peter out, that’s when the dark underbelly of his glitzy life is revealed: An affair, two kids out of wedlock, irresponsible corporate spending, a tarnished reputation among colleagues. And, perhaps most fatally of all, an impulse to still appear expensive despite not having any money at all. That’s what leads him to a life of crime, of lying, of running from responsibilities, moving closer and closer to a point of desperation.

The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang | The Atavist, $

Here’s another straight-up heist story, driven almost entirely by how well it’s been researched, structured and narrated. Not that you’d expect anything different from The Atavist.

What started out as a small gang of low-level criminals eventually hit its stride, tracing a swath of bank robberies across the U.S. and Canada. And despite being mostly amateurish, the manage to keep on slipping past law enforcement, carried by strokes of luck and ingenuity. Not much else to say here except that sometimes a life of crime is also a life of addiction, and that it keeps people trapped in destructive patterns despite wanting no more of it.

Alberta’s New Separatists | MacLean’s, Free

This is an interesting type of longform story: It’s a series of interviews with people who want Alberta to secede from Canada and be its own country. What becomes immediately clear is that this movement is primarily right-wing and conservative, and many of the arguments made in this piece are downright racist and xenophobic. Some of them don’t even bother to hide it.

But while it’s easy to dismiss them as wholly red-pilled and bigots, what the piece also shows is that there are people in this movement who are actually reasonable, with understandable concerns. There are real economic anxieties underlying many of the conservative talking points that we readily disregard, and actual material conditions that need addressing. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to look beyond their inflammatory rhetoric and see what the true problem is.

The Planet is Overheating. Why is the News Looking Away? | Grist, Free

The climate crisis is the news story of our time. And while I understand when other people tell me that it’s not sexy, not urgent, not attention-grabbing enough, I don’t think we in the media have the luxury of those excuses. I’d say it’s our job to make the climate crisis palatable for our audiences. It’s our moral responsibility, regardless of how others might insist on “alternative” or “contradicting” viewpoints. Or, as this story shows, regardless of how hostile the U.S. government is to environmental reportage, or how much the administration wants to flood the news cycle with confusion.

In a previous life, when I was still a sprightly young reporter with big dreams, I wanted so badly to write for Vanity Fair. Stories like these are why (and I’d be lying if I said this one didn’t at least reignite some of that spark).

The reporting here isn’t standout, I have to say: Looks like just a few in-depth interviews, some archival research into court documents, probably newspapers. The writing isn’t uniquely impressive, too. It definitely does the job, but the prose isn’t something to leave a mark.

But still, the piece is wildly entertaining. The writer has this gift of making you care about the people in this story, even if they happen to be part of some big powerful celebrity families and aren’t readily relatable to the regular person. At the same time, the writer also inflames in you a burning irritation toward this titular squatter and frustration with how she’s able to keep doing this, over and over, despite already being on the radar of the law. She can’t keep getting away with it.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that Vanity Fair has a knack for running stories that make you feel. That’s something that we need more of in this industry.

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

I have a… complicated relationship with the medical establishment. I was educated in molecular biology and am currently working in an industry-focused magazine, so I understand the value of data-driven medical decisions, timely treatment, prudent use of antibiotics, things like those.

But I’m also a human. I understand that there are massive gaps in how we understand human biology and pathology—so much so that we probably don’t know what we still don’t know. And I also understand that so many people fall through these holes in our knowledge: Thousands, if not millions, with illnesses that we don’t know enough about to even have names for. What’s the correct treatment decision to make in those cases?

This story is less of an extreme case, but is nevertheless a great example of how people get caught in between these often-academic disagreements between experts and are left untreated and suffering in the meantime.

On the Trail of a Silver Thief | Garden&Gun, Free

Huh—another heist story. I didn’t realize I had a lot of these lined up for this week. This one, if I’m being extremely honest, is probably the least memorable of the three thief tales this week. And I don’t mean that to say that this story is bad (it wouldn’t have made the list otherwise), just that Truly*Adventurous and The Atavist are just exceptional at running polished pieces.

Still, this one has its appeal. It isn’t a bank robbery, for one, and it has that allure of the expensive silverware that’s being stolen. The story is also structured more rigidly, breaking it down into discrete chunks—ie, the crime, the suspect, the sting, etc—as opposed to a more winding narrative. That made it much easier for me to keep tabs on details.

There are no Psychopaths | Aeon, Free

Another one that should be in my wheelhouse (as a science writer) but nevertheless pushes my boundaries. This is an essay written by a researcher whose body of work has shown that the concept of psychopathy may not actually exist. This is an important disclaimer (that the piece itself buries, btw) that I think should be made clear upfront: The author has at least some vested interest in the central thesis of article.

He then goes on to lay out an admittedly solid argument supporting his case, even going as far as to call psychopathy as a zombie concept—one that sticks around even after being disproven. Something like the flat earth. Still, I can’t help but feel… uncomfortable with how the story makes its point. It feels a bit too combative, a bit too dismissive of the contrary. Definitely not something I’d have expected from an academic. Or maybe I’m tone-policing here. After all, shaking thing up is central to how Aeon works.

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! 👋