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LUNCH BREAK READS

Happy Thursday!

Four interesting reads for your lunch break today; some long, some shorter.

I am also excited to announce that we are launching The Lunch Club, a subscription that allows you to support the ongoing work we are doing. Signing up will get you access to the LBR Reading List, a weekend e-mail with the top five stories we shared that week, and a monthly note from me about the stories that didn’t make the cut, what I am reading, and more. If you’ve already supported the newsletter (thank you!), you’re automatically enrolled in the Lunch Club.

With that out of the way, let’s get to it!

Brett

01 • 70 Minute Read
Atavist Magazine Barry Meier
You Can Run
Barry Meier reconstructs the year and a half Erin and Meredith McCann spent as fugitives. In 1984 their father, John McCann III, a charming Pittsburgh con man, fled a federal cocaine-trafficking investigation and dragged his family across Majorca, England, and British Columbia under forged passports and invented names. The girls were told it was a tax dispute. John drew a life sentence and died in prison; their mother, Leah, dodged charges and insisted for decades she knew nothing. Only after Leah's death did the sisters open boxes of government files and learn how deeply both parents had lied.
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02 • 50 Minute Read
The Atlantic Alex Tizon
My Family's Slave
Shoutout to LBR Reader Laila for reminding me about this story from 2017. Alex Tizon's family kept a slave. Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. They called her Lola. Tizon's grandfather gave her to his daughter in the Philippines, and for decades she cooked, cleaned, and raised five children without pay. The family brought her to America in 1964 and hid her, sometimes beating her, refusing her pleas to send money home. Tizon recounts his reckoning as a boy, his fights with his mother, and Lola's stranded years without legal papers. After his mother died, Lola lived freely with him until her death at 86. He carried her ashes back home.
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03 • 19 Minute Read
The New Yorker Brady Brickner-Wood
The Men Who Lie About Their Height
Men inflate their height constantly. Brady Brickner-Wood traces the habit from Stalin's doctored photos to today's dating apps, where women set six-foot filters and shorter men add a few inches to slip past them. A 2008 study found most users misrepresented themselves, men exaggerating height most. The looksmaxxing subculture now sells limb-lengthening surgery as a fix. Basketball runs on the same lies. Charles Barkley admitted padding his listing, and Kevin Durant marketed himself as shorter to protect his position. At the NBA combine Brickner-Wood attended, the league measures prospects shoeless to the quarter inch and publishes every result.
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04 • 7 Minute Read
USA Today Will Carless
Exclusive leaked documents expose growing White supremacist group
Internal documents leaked to USA TODAY reveal that Patriot Front, one of the country's largest White supremacist groups, has more than 540 members spread across 49 states and has roughly doubled in size every year since 2018. Will Carless reports that the files include recruitment manuals, propaganda guides controlled by 27-year-old leader Thomas Rousseau, and a roster of affiliated "active clubs" where young men train in mixed martial arts. Researchers at the SPLC and ADL describe a disciplined operation built to look patriotic while concealing its goal of a White ethnostate. Rousseau wants 600 members by July.
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