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We have a few good ones lined up for today, I hope you enjoy.
ICIJ unwinds how Merck turned Keytruda into a $31 billion-a-year drug while patients in Guatemala, India, and South Africa go without.
The SF Standard tells the story of Anne Morrison, who chose her death date and spent her last years hoping a lost daughter would knock.
A working TV writer in WIRED files a dispatch from inside the AI training economy, where everyone who used to make television is now teaching the machine to replace them.
Have any issues accessing a story? Hit reply to this e-mail, and I will do my best to help you out.
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ICIJ
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Sydney P. Freedberg, Brenda Medina and Denise Ajiri
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Merck has built a fortress of 1,212 patent applications across 53 countries around Keytruda, the cancer drug that generated $31.7 billion in 2025 sales and nearly half the company's revenue. A yearlong investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 47 partners found Merck pushes higher dosages than some researchers say is necessary, funnels millions to doctors and patient groups, and lobbies governments to block cheaper rivals. List prices range from $80,000 a year in Germany to $208,000 in the U.S. In Guatemala, oncologist Julio Ramírez rations doses among patients. "What's left for me to do? To play God."
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Want my 15 favorite longform stories?
I put together the LBR 15, a collection of my favorite longform stories that I recommend to folks looking for a story to get lost in. I am sharing the list with any subscriber who refers one new subscriber.
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The San Francisco Standard
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David Sjostedt
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Anne Morrison ended her life on March 9 under California's End of Life Option Act, surrounded by two dozen people in her Tenderloin apartment. She was 85, dying of breast cancer, and had chosen the date because it was her late son Garrett's birthday. One person was missing: her daughter Jennifer, lost to meth addiction and homelessness more than two decades earlier. Anne stayed in the apartment for years hoping Jennifer might return. She saw her once, in 2021, and didn't recognize her until she was gone. Anne built a chosen family of neighbors and addicts she'd quietly saved. Jennifer never came back.
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Current Affairs
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Jon Greenaway
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Jon Greenaway argues that Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show is not entertainment but ritual: the host slapping his desk and convulsing into laughter before guests reach the punchline, presiding over Pictionary and Lip Sync Battle as a "court jester of the Anthropocene." Fallon mussed Donald Trump's hair in 2016, gave away a Paris Hilton NFT on air, and recently sat through Sam Altman's pitch for ChatGPT as a parental surrogate without breaking his grin. Trump has called for the firing of Colbert, Kimmel, and Meyers but spared Fallon. Greenaway reads the omission as recognition that vacant niceness poses no threat to power.
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A Hollywood TV writer, broke after the 2023 strike and a producer who defaulted on a six-figure check, took a side gig training AI for companies like Mercor, Outlier, and Turing. Over eight months she ran 20 contracts: grading chatbot responses, annotating videos, generating decapitation imagery for red teams. Wages collapsed from $150 an hour for experts to $50, with grunt work paying $16, below California minimum. Projects vanish without warning. Slack channels evaporate mid-task. Lawsuits allege Mercor misclassifies its 30,000 contractors as independent. Her colleagues are mostly laid-off professionals in their thirties and forties, managed by 22-year-olds fresh from the Ivy League.
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