Excellent Reads

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Are you tired of clickbait and the current state of journalism? This community is meant to remind you that excellent journalism still happens. While not sticking to a specific topic, the focus will be on high-quality articles and discussion around their topics.

Politics is allowed, but should not be the main focus of the community.

Submissions should be articles of medium length or longer. As in, it should take you 5 minutes or more to read it. Article series’ would also qualify.

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AwesomeLowlander

Ponzi Schemes, Private Yachts, and a Missing $250 Million in Crypto: The Strange Tale of Quadriga (www.vanityfair.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/longreads

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The smiling boy visited Sunnybrook Yachts in the summer of 2017, after the value of Bitcoin had reached an all-time high, having tripled in five months. Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canada’s east coast. Its clients tended to be surgeons and litigators and C-suiters who travel from Toronto and Paris and Hawaii to summer in Nova Scotia; their wives wear silks and Manolos and perfect fingernails that cost $300 yesterday at the salon. The smiling boy stood out. He wore a wrinkled golf shirt, cargo shorts, and beat-up Birkenstocks, and he was obscenely young, with sandy hair and pale skin that appeared not to have seen sunlight since puberty. He was accompanied by a girlfriend who drove her own Jeep. They struck the yacht salesman as a couple you’d less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. Most conspicuous was the odd way that the young man always seemed to be smiling. It was a gentle, unflappable smile. It put strangers at ease; it made him seem lighthearted. It was difficult to imagine that this particular trait was contrived, but later, after it was revealed that nearly everything about him was a work of pure contrivance, you had to wonder whether the incessant smiling was just another part of the act.