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LUNCH BREAK READS

Happy Wednesday.

Dating apps, billionaire boot camps, jail cells, and the cosmos. Not a bad lineup for a lunch break.

Let’s get to it!

Brett

01 • ~26 Minute Read
ProPublica Nichole Manna
Inmates Have Died in the Care of Armor Health Companies. Jails Keep Contracting With Them Anyway.
Brian Tracey spent nine days in a Florida jail struggling to breathe before he died on the medical ward floor, naked and alone, thirty minutes before anyone noticed. He was supposed to be released that day. His care was provided by Armor Health, an affiliate of Miami-based Armor Health Management, a company with over 450 lawsuits in seven years and a felony conviction in Wisconsin for inmate abuse. Florida law bars convicted vendors from public contracts. The state has never acted against Armor, and won't say why. One county still holds an active contract with an Armor entity today.
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02 • ~19 Minute Read
Politico Daniel Han
‘I thought I had my future wife’: The Florida woman catfishing America’s political class
Rob Field, a top aide to New Jersey's governor, thought he had found his future wife after five months of dates, texts, and gifts. She was not who she said she was. According to a lawsuit Field filed this week, the woman he knew as Leah Andrews was actually Alysia Gamble, a married Florida nurse and former QAnon organizer working to capture candid recordings for conservative influencer Steven Crowder. Politico identified at least three other men Gamble targeted the same way. Field says he now has PTSD. New Jersey's one-party consent recording law meant nothing she did was necessarily illegal.
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03 • ~13 Minute Read
Wall Street Journal Juliet Chung
The Exclusive Retreat Where Wealthy Kids Learn How Not to Blow an Inheritance
On a drizzly morning in Austin, a dozen college students and twentysomethings from families worth a collective $7 billion gather at an Airbnb to learn how not to blow their inheritances. Wealth coach Michael Cole, founder of peer-membership group R360, runs the retreat. The hard truth he delivers: these kids will almost certainly never build the kind of fortune their parents did. So instead of chasing that scorecard, Cole pushes them to think as "wealth re-creators." Programming covers real estate investing, startup pitching, prenup strategy, and the psychological weight of growing up in someone else's very large shadow.
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04 • ~10 Minute Read
The Atlantic Alan Lightman
The Ordinary Miracle of Existing
Physicist and MIT professor Alan Lightman opens with a 15th-century Portuguese explorer rounding the cape that marked the edge of the known world, then turns the lens inward. The number of possible human DNA arrangements exceeds the atoms in the observable universe. Each conception produces a hundred thousand billion possible people. You are one outcome from that lottery. Lightman's point: existence itself is so improbable it borders on miraculous, yet we treat it as background noise. His prescription is gratitude without sentimentality, responsibility without grandiosity, and attention to the fact that the universe will never produce another you.
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