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LUNCH BREAK READS

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📣 Thank you to Olivia from Austin, TX for supporting LBR this week!

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01 • 45 Minute Read
ProPublica Joaquin Sapien
"That Guy Is Still Out There"
A Syracuse detective closed a violent rape investigation in five hours, filing it away as inactive before the sun went down. The victim, novelist Alice Sebold, later identified a man on the street, and Anthony Broadwater spent sixteen years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Joaquin Sapien spent two and a half years digging through thousands of leaked pages, tracing how a serial rapist may have operated for years near the same park while Broadwater sat behind bars. One confessed assailant still lives in Syracuse. Sapien knocked on his door.
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02 • 32 Minute Read
The New York Times Magazine Pamela Colloff
Capital Punishment Is on the Decline. Except in Ron DeSantis's Florida.
Florida executed nineteen men last year, more than any state has in eight decades, while most of the country has turned away from the death penalty. Pamela Colloff spent months with Father Dustin Feddon, a priest who sits beside condemned men as they die, and watched the toll accumulate in sleepless nights and recurring visions. Governor Ron DeSantis alone decides who dies and when, behind closed doors, with no public criteria, and one family sent him custom Sharpies. A former warden who ran the electric chair says the pace is now breaking the people who carry it out.
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03 • 14 Minute Read
The Atlantic Matteo Wong
The New (And Slightly Smelly) Center of the AI Boom
Two tech founders bought live lobsters from a San Francisco market, intending to wire their nervous systems to an AI agent and let it decide how they should move. Matteo Wong spent a week embedded inside the city's hacker houses, where more than twenty aspiring founders share bathrooms, kitchens and a belief that scale will eventually save the world. Rent in one runs three thousand dollars a month. In another, residents get cooking and laundry handled so they can work twenty more hours a week. Sam Altman advises one network. The lobsters never made it to surgery.
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04 • 17 Minute Read
The Guardian William Davies
What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control – and human beings
In a London park, a frantic boxer puppy refused to come back to her owner, igniting a standoff with another dog walker who asked if he wanted a dogfight. Sociologist William Davies spent two years researching positive reinforcement training, guided by celebrity trainer Steve Mann's philosophy that dogs have no moral sense and therefore cannot be punished, only conditioned. Davies traces the same logic through Nietzsche and BF Skinner, and admits to his own fantasies of rehoming his dog during her hardest months. Boxer rescue charities report the most common surrender age is fourteen months. Dusty made it past that milestone, barely.
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