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It is great to be back after a long, relaxing weekend. I have a handful of great stories for your lunch break, including two from the archives that I enjoyed re-reading this weekend.
If you’re having issues accessing any of the stories we share, do not hesitate to reach out. I might be able to solve the problem for you.
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The Lunch Club
📣 Subscriber Shoutout: Thanks to Jameson S. for supporting LBR this week.
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The New York Times
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Mark O’Connell
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A leaked hot-mic clip last September caught Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin discussing organ replacement and the prospect of cheating death as they walked toward Tiananmen Square. Mark O'Connell uses that fragment to examine a strange convergence: the world's most powerful autocrats and a small cluster of tech billionaires now share an active obsession with radical life extension. Peter Thiel funds longevity biotech. Sam Altman has put $180 million into Retro Biosciences. Bryan Johnson takes plasma transfusions from his teenage son. Saudi Arabia bankrolls a $1 billion foundation. One Singapore fund backs research into "brainless clones" as future spare-part bodies.
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The Atlantic
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Ross Anderson
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Bringing back this Ross Anderson story from 2021. For decades, archaeology taught that the first Americans were Clovis people who walked down from Beringia 13,500 years ago chasing mammoths. Ross reports on a competing theory gaining ground: that the first arrivals came by sea, paddling small boats down a "kelp highway" along the Pacific coast. The evidence sits on California's Channel Islands, where Todd Braje and his team have excavated a 13,100-year-old human femur. Most of the proof, though, is underwater. Amy Gusick is now searching the ocean floor for submerged Ice Age settlements that could rewrite the human origin story of two continents.
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The New Yorker
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Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
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Djena was eight when her father drove her four hundred miles to a senior Guinean official's house. She was ten when she flew to Texas. For sixteen years, Mohamed Toure and Denise Cros-Toure kept her in their Southlake mansion as an unpaid servant, beating her, denying her schooling, and telling neighbors she was their niece. Some neighbors noticed. One called the FBI. Kids in the neighborhood called her a "slave." Yudhijit Bhattacharjee traces how Djena finally escaped through a Facebook message in 2016, and how federal agents built a forced-labor case from absences: no school records, no doctor visits, no photographs.
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Smithsonian Magazine
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Mike Dash and Ellen Wexler
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In 1978, Soviet geologists flying over the southern Siberian taiga spotted a clearing 150 miles from the nearest settlement. Inside a soot-blackened cabin, they found Karp Lykov and four of his children, Old Believers who had fled Stalinist religious persecution in 1936 and lived in total isolation ever since. The two youngest had been born in the wild and had never seen bread. They had survived famine, ate leather shoes one winter, and rebuilt a rye crop from a single grain. Three of the four children died within years of contact. Agafia, now 80, still lives in the wilderness.
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