The Lazy Reader

25/04/2024

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"Internet platforms need to recognize that creative human communities are highly valuable resources to cultivate, not merely sources of exploitable raw material for LLMs. Ways to nurture them include supporting (and paying) human moderators and enforcing copyrights that protect, for a reasonable time, creative content from being devoured by AIs."

A great public resource is at risk of being destroyed.

22/04/2024

Happy TLR Day!

Read the full newsletter here, and jumpstart your week with some of the best longform stories across the internet: https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/p/tlr-12

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We're shining this week's spotlight on SHEIN, which has taken the fast fashion formula and supercharged it with the latest technological advancements of the 21st century. How has the e-commerce giant taken the world by storm?

PLUS: many other incredible longform stories, all in our newsletter!

Subscribe and read with us! Drops every Monday 📖🤓

19/04/2024

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"I believe it was a mistake to give away journalism for free in the 1990s. Information is not and never has been free. I devoutly believe that news organizations need to survive and figure out a revenue model that allows them to do so. But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to make the best decisions in a constitutional democracy."

The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election

17/04/2024

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I don't have a kid yet, but it feels like I understand this bit very well:

"As for the kid-having Bluey fans, we’re immersed in a short phase of life that’s chock-full of unexpected finales. You never think you’ll be done with changing diapers, paying for preschool, or the period of time when your kid calls “chapstick” “capchips”—and then one day, it’s over. It makes perfect sense that “The Sign” hit home, even if it’s not really the end."

Whether or not Bluey is ending (it’s not), this feels like a turning point.

15/04/2024

Happy TLR Day!

Read the full newsletter here, and jumpstart your week with some of the best longform stories across the internet: https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/p/tlr-11
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This week, we have Tesla under the spotlight, and not in a good way. A new exposé from The Nation reveals disturbing levels of racism and sexism, not to mention harassment and borderline-abuse, going on at its factories.

But it's not like this is new. Many other media outfits and government agencies have been on the company's case for labor violations for years. It makes you wonder why nothing concrete has come out of them so far.

PLUS: many other incredible longform stories, all in our newsletter!

Subscribe and read with us! Drops every Monday 📖🤓

Plus: Chasing eclipses, peering beyond death, and world war ants 🐜💥

12/04/2024

Friday reading!!

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Drops every Monday!

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This is a really cool story. Plus I'm a very big fan of what the Internet Archive is doing. That said, the writer does a really good job of pointing out the risks of this initiative, especially for Aruba. Entrusting your entire historical archive to a foreign private entity can be quite a gamble, and I imagine it puts your country at the whims of the geopolitical winds.

"It’s unusual for a country to outsource this sort of project to a foreign nonprofit. 'In a dream world, every national library would have enough funds to bring on an amazing team of people,' says University of Waterloo history professor Ian Milligan, who is writing a book on the Internet Archive’s origins, and was not involved in the Aruba project. 'Governments often don't have that.'"

By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation’s history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity.

11/04/2024

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"Of course, it was natural for doctors, nurses and pharmacists to expect that, once computers entered our complex, chaotic and often dangerous world, they would make things better. After all, in our off-duty lives we are so thoroughly used to taking out our iPhones, downloading an app, and off we go.

But we’re learning that the magic of information technology, so familiar to us in the consumer world that it nearly seems “normal,” is far more elusive in the world of medicine.

Though computers can and do improve patient safety in many ways, the case of Pablo Garcia vividly illustrates that, even in one of the world’s best hospitals, filled with well-trained, careful and caring doctors, nurses and pharmacists, technology can cause breathtaking errors.

This one began when a young physician went to an electronic health record and set a process in motion that never could have happened in the age of paper."

When Pablo Garcia was admitted, he felt fine. Then the hospital made him very sick. Blame high-tech medicine.

10/04/2024

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"In addition to conflating a natural ‘is’ with a political ‘ought’, the temptations of ant anthropomorphism can also lead to a limited, and limiting, view of natural history. Surely the habit of worker ants in Argentine nests to kill nine-tenths of their queens every spring – seemingly clearing out the old to make way for the new – is enough to deter parallels between ant societies and human politics?"

"The more I learn, the more I am struck by the ants’ strangeness rather than their similarities with human society. There is another way to be a globalised society – one that is utterly unlike our own. I am not even sure we have the language to convey, for example, a colony’s ability to take bits of information from thousands of tiny brains and turn it into a distributed, constantly updated picture of their world. Even ‘smell’ seems a feeble word to describe the ability of ants’ antennae to read chemicals on the air and on each other."

Incredible reflection on the social nature of ants, its parallels to the human histories of colonization and communism--and how making such parallels is a disservice to both us and ants.

Over the past four centuries quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own

08/04/2024

Happy TLR Day!

Read the full newsletter here, and jumpstart your week with some of the best longform stories across the internet: https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/p/tlr-10

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This week, our spotlight story is an infuriating look into sexual harassment, intimidation, and the lack of systematic accountability in earth science. Women have come forward to reveal the predatory behaviors of one of the most prominent figures in geology, and finally a reckoning is at hand, but why does it feel like justice is still far away?

PLUS: Many, many more incredible stories inside the newsletter!

Subscribe here: https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/subscribe

05/04/2024

"Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe – something that few stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about."

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Read more thought-provoking essays like this on the TLR newsletter!

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The Long Read: The values of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry are not the birthright of a single culture. In fact, the very notion of something called ‘western culture’ is a modern invention

04/04/2024

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"For some time at the start of each year, the Central Valley becomes a sort of giant, mechanized jamboree of honeybees, with 18-wheelers and semis bearing several million hives traversing this monoculture and depositing their cargo in orchards to propagate the crop. We are accustomed to aggregating sheep and cows and, to a lesser degree at home, our cats and dogs."

"But in terms of the sheer numbers — 2.7 million hives, according to Wenger, or a lowball estimate of some 54 billion bees to support this year’s almond crop — there is little to compare to the annual seething mass of bees clustered in California outside of enthralling wild scenes like the African migration of wildebeest."

Where once there was cattle and horse rustling, the American West is now confronting the theft of its bees.

03/04/2024

"It [Gmail] was such a mind-bending concept that shortly after The Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on the afternoon of April Fools’ 2004, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency it had been duped by Google’s pranksters."

“'That was part of the charm, making a product that people won’t believe is real. It kind of changed people’s perceptions about the kinds of applications that were possible within a web browser,' former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled during a recent AP interview about his efforts to build Gmail."

Read more stories like these on the TLR newsletter. Drops every Monday! https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/subscribe

When Gmail was unveiled 20 years ago, people thought it was Google's April Fool's Day joke.

01/04/2024

Happy TLR Day!

Read the full newsletter here, and jumpstart your week with some of the best longform stories across the internet: https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/p/tlr-9

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Yep -- we've moved to Monday! I figured it wasn't too smart (or nice) to ask people to open their emails on a Sunday. Hopefully with this new schedule, I can help you find something to keep you preoccupied during that dreaded Monday commute.

This week's spotlight story is huge and controversial. Kerry Howley writes about the massively popular neuroscientist-slash-podcaster Andrew Huberman, who apparently and allegedly has been using his platform to manipulate and lie to several women.

Many more incredible stories and other fun stuff inside the newsletter!

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Just one long read per week—and then some 😉

29/03/2024

Friday reading!

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I don't listen to this guy and I only see know him from when my TikTok FYP mistakenly shows me self-help videos, so this is personally a very low-stakes story for me. But it's so very spicy and shocking and infuriating. More than the drama, the biggest thing I got out of this is that I should be approaching these self-help guru types with much more skepticism.

“'People high on psychopathy are good at deception,' says [evolutionary psychologist David] Buss. 'I don’t know if they’re good at self-deception.'”

The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist.

27/03/2024

"ProPublica reviewed thousands of pages of emails and memos by U.S. officials, letters to foreign ministries, correspondence from industry groups and academic research. We also interviewed health experts and government leaders in nearly two dozen countries, including former U.S. officials."

"Together, the reporting shows the U.S. government repeatedly used its muscle to advance the interests of multinational baby formula companies, such as Mead Johnson and Abbott, while thwarting the efforts of Thailand and other developing countries to safeguard the health of their youngest children."

More infuriating and interesting reads like this on the TLR newsletter. Subscribe here: https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Records and interviews show that the U.S. government repeatedly used its muscle to advance the interests of large baby formula companies while thwarting the efforts of Thailand and other developing countries to safeguard children’s health.

26/03/2024

This is a really revealing peek behind all the very public (and honestly very messy) disagreements between high-profile medical personalities at the height of the pandemic.

I remember being torn between the push and pull of needing stronger more evidence and the urgency of the situation, but I never knew the fissures ran this deep.

I'm still not quite sure about where I fall in this debate, but I'm certain that it's important for experts to figure something out (or at least find a way to settle spats away from the public eye), because bickering with and undermining each other will only weaken everyone's trust in the medical and scientific community.

More longform reads like this on our weekly newsletter. Subscribe here: https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/subscrib

A particular rigor in evidence isn’t always practical in informing public health decisions, some experts say.

25/03/2024

First post!! 🎉🎉

Every week, The Lazy Reader will spotlight one incredible piece of longform journalism from across the internet. This week, that honor goes to Sasha Issenberg's incredible profile of Democrat icon Hal Machow for POLITICO.

Plus: we also have a few other reading recommendations, all of which are just as gripping as our headliner story. I promise you'll want to disappear into at least one of the articles in this week's edition.

And there might even be a surprise spotlight in there somewhere! 😉

🔗 https://the-lazy-reader.beehiiv.com/p/tlr-8
📸 POLITICO illustration by Jade Cuevas; Images by iStock