'The faintly utopian glow of the early Internet'

Hello 👋 

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

Battling with an intense stiff neck this week—the kind that radiates all the way up your skull and freezes muscles all the way down your back. It’s incredibly painful. So I’ll keep the intro short and jump straight into the list.

Some choice picks from last week’s newsletter, in case you missed that:

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!

Leading this week’s newsletter with something lower-stakes than usual, something fun. Plus even if this story was published in 2020, it’s one that’s uncannily timely again, given Wikipedia’s recent strong stance against AI—setting it apart in an incredible way from other websites that have embraced not just the platform but also content produced using the creativity of actual humans.

Here, WIRED looks at Wikipedia as a communal wonder, a bottom-up approach to knowledge production, propagation, and preservation. Instead of the typical top-down model from experts and scholars, Wikipedia empowers enthusiasts to populate and maintain its pages. This, as we know today, has resulted in some of the most comprehensive and thorough pages on an impressive range of topics.

Wikipedia of course isn’t spotless, and it carries with it the usual faults of shared online spaces. But I’m inclined to agree with WIRED here, Wiki is (one of) the last best place online.

The Contestant | California Sunday, Free

Until now I mourn California Sunday. They always ran such well-reported, well-written pieces, and they could always see what others couldn’t. This is one such story, looking at the dark history behind one of Peru’s most popular TV sensations, and a blemish on the career of one of the country’s most decorated journalists. The article combines thorough archival research with on-the-ground reportage to bring readers into the studio of Valor de la Verdad.

Minding the Monster | The Walrus, Free

This was a very challenging story for me to read. Because it talks a lot about child abuse (let this be your content warning), yes, but also because it offers a rehabilitative, non-carceral alternative to our current approach of just jailing them up and forgetting about them. I concede that I am of this latter belief, choosing to be vengeful and punitive against these offenders to the maximum that the law will allow. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable position to hold: The story itself admits that sexually abusing children is, in many ways, one of the purest forms of evil that we recognize.

But I also concede that just dumping them in prisons isn’t productive. And this story has shown me a more humane and ultimately better alternative—even if it’s hard for me to swallow that.

A Secret History of Psychosis | The New York Times, $

I often don’t enjoy these mid-length NYT articles—heftier than their news stories but not quite as in-depth as their full-blown longform stories that can reach past 10,000 words. They always come up short, whether it be in terms of the amount of information they carry or the space that they give the narrative to breathe and develop. But this one resonated deeply with me, and I think that’s because of how profoundly emotional and introspective it is.

Guilt Drove Him to Keep his Brain-Injured Wife Alive. What Would She Have Wanted? | Los Angeles Times, Free

Death was one of the earliest subjects that the TLR audience took an intense fascination with (I can see your click behaviors, I know what you guys like). I’ve moved away from it in recent months largely because it gives me a lot of anxiety, but there are some pieces that are just worth enduring some discomfort for. Here, the LA Times doesn’t just confront our fear or death, but also guilt and love and the refusal to let go.

Six Months With Mom | Truly*Adventurous, Free

Hmm. I may have set my expectations too high for this one. Truly*Adventurous had always floored me with their excellent execution, so I probably just kept on raising my expectations with every story. Because by no means is this one badly written or poorly reported, but it just left me wanting for something more. For intrigue, maybe, or for a more exciting, gripping narrative.

But don’t let my nitpicking turn you off from this story. It’s about how much strain a mother-daughter relationship can take, and how far one is willing to go to keep the bond going.

Crime truly is TexasMonthly’s bread-and-butter—an interesting genre to specialize in, considering what that might say about its place of coverage.

Then again, it might actually be the case that there are a lot of sensational, extraordinary crimes in Texas. This one, at the very least, is a spectacular case of a lawyer who pulled himself up the ladder by taking unfashionable driving-while-intoxicated cases. But then, by sheer desire to push his career even farther, ends up working with the drug cartel. This proves to be undoing.

As with all good crime stories, this one is rich in moral lessons: the dangers of excessive ambition, the need to be extra discerning about your circle, the value of trusting your gut. But, as is typical of TexasMonthly pieces, the narrative alone is more than enough to make this article great.

I have once again fallen completely enamored with The Atavist. There’s a certain level of quality and polish to its stories that I have trouble consistently finding with most other outlets (yes, sometimes with giants such as The New Yorker or The New York Times, too). I guess that’s just the key advantage of being completely dedicated to running longform stories.

After all, when your newsroom doesn’t have to bother with keeping up with the daily grind of the news cycle (which these days have gotten extremely crazy, let me tell you), you have much more time and energy to dive deep into something like this—the most brazen bank heist in Denmark, a famously peaceful country with a low crime rate.

And dive the writer did. The level of detail here is incredible, sometimes giving a second-by-second play of the crimes. The number of different POVs, too, demonstrates just how much research went into this story, and how overwhelming all of it must have been. To be able to distill all of that into such a clear and compelling narrative, then, is impressive beyond words.

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! 👋