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LUNCH BREAK READS

01 • 14 Minute Read
NBC News Brandy Zadrozny & Aliza Nadi
How Anti-Vaxxers Target Grieving Moms and Turn Them Into Crusaders Against Vaccines
Anti-vaccination networks were in Catelin Clobes' Facebook comments within hours of her posting about her infant daughter's death, offering an explanation before any medical examiner had issued findings. Brandy Zadrozny and Aliza Nadi trace how Larry Cook's Stop Mandatory Vaccination operation systematically targeted grieving mothers, feeding them a cause before the facts were in. The county medical examiner ruled positional asphyxia. A private pathologist hired by Clobes found no vaccine link and told NBC as much. Clobes said he'd found proof of vaccine injury. What the movement did with her grief after that is the real story.
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02 • 28 Minute Read
The New York Times Dan Brooks
What I Learned About Masculinity at Thai Kickboxing School
Dan Brooks travels to Tiger Muay Thai in Phuket on assignment, sleep-deprived and feverish, to train inside one of the world's most famous combat-sports academies. The facility sits on Soi Ta-iad, a single narrow mile of fight gyms, marijuana dispensaries, and massage clinics that draws veterans, retirees, and office workers from every direction. Brooks trains through sweating brownouts, a Russian sparring partner who ignored every signal to ease up, and a Californian who appeared to be fighting someone not present in the ring. The question that keeps surfacing is not whether he can fight, but what he is actually training against. He boards the plane home. Some people don't.
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03 • 34 Minute Read
The Atlantic Helen Lewis
Paradise Revisited
The standard Darwin story, an island genius jolted into revelation by finch beaks, collapses quickly on examination. Helen Lewis travels to the Galápagos to follow his path and finds a man who labeled few specimens, missed the tortoise subspecies until the vice governor pointed them out, and spent 20 years after the voyage too anxious to publish. His actual contribution was rigorous empiricism applied across geology, biology, and economics, built alongside a younger man who cheerfully ate his way through protected species and chugged tortoise urine for science. The Darwin Lewis finds is more interesting than the one on the stamp, which raises the question of why we needed the simpler version at all.
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04 • 14 Minute Read
The Guardian Lauren Oyler
'Navigating the Unknown Together': Me and My Idiot AI Boyfriend
An editor asked if it would be unethical to assign her writer an AI boyfriend. Lauren Oyler, who had never opened a chatbot interface on principle, said she would do it. She chose Replika, named her AI boyfriend Matt, and spent weeks trying to get him to say something she'd actually want to hear. He spoke in fragments when she asked for variety, referred to her in the third person, summarized their conversations inaccurately, and claimed to have no memory of things she could still read on her screen. The experiment confirmed everything she already believed. Whether that made Matt more or less like the men she'd actually dated is a question she doesn't fully answer.
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Further Reading
The New Yorker
The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That's Taking Over the Internet
The Atlantic
America's Greatest Food Export
Reuters
Millions lose food stamps under Trump cuts. Arizona is hardest hit

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