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Support Lunch Break Reads
If you look forward to these four reads every day, consider joining the Lunch Club. It keeps LBR going.
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Four reads to carry you through your lunch break today. I am in Austin, TX this week, so if anyone has recommendations, please send them my way!
Jessica Lipsky checked a praised prison memoir against police records and found the man its author called a monster stood 5-foot-4.
A mother spent years pushing doctors to see a rare mutation that makes a common anesthetic gas dangerous for some children.
| Narratively | Jessica Lipsky |
| In November 1997, maids at a Reno hotel found Mark Slavin beaten and strangled, a laundry bag over his head and a belt around his neck. Slavin, a close friend of writer Jessica Lipsky's father, had been killed by Jimmy Lerner, a Pacific Bell manager he'd met at Alcoholics Anonymous, in a drug-fueled fight detectives said lasted over two hours. Lerner pleaded down to manslaughter and, in prison, wrote You Got Nothing Coming, a praised 2002 memoir casting his victim as a hulking, knife-wielding "Monster." In reality Slavin was 5-foot-4 and much smaller than Lerner, and police records undercut Lerner's self-defense story. Slavin's sister sued for the book's profits, but Nevada's Supreme Court sided with Lerner, striking down the state law meant to stop criminals from profiting off their crimes. |
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| The New York Times | Trisha Thadani |
| In the fall of 2019, Rajeev Thadani collapsed at home in New Jersey after a round of chemotherapy for Stage 4 lung cancer and vowed he was done with "poisons." Long wary of doctors, he had ignored an earlier scan showing a lung nodule. Now he flew to Envita, an Arizona clinic charging nearly $10,000 a week for "proprietary" chemotherapy alongside unproven therapies like ozone infusions and coffee enemas. The staff were warm, and he felt hope for the first time, but he wasted away, spending about $200,000 in a few months. Envita, the subject of a critical 2015 FDA criminal investigation report, says patients sign forms disclosing risks and costs. His daughter, Trisha Thadani, argues such clinics prey on patients' hunger for empathy and certainty, which mainstream medicine rarely offers. Her father died in an Arizona ICU, begging for a dog-deworming powder he'd read about online. |
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| In 2022, Tyler Jordan, a stonecutter at his parents' Colorado countertop shop, was diagnosed with silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by breathing silica dust. He had spent years cutting artificial quartz, a trendy countertop material containing up to 93% crystalline silica, far more than natural stone. The disease led to kidney failure and a transplant from his father. California has tied more than 600 cases to the material, and Australia has banned it. Jordan is among hundreds of workers suing manufacturers, led by Minnesota-based Cambria, which blames small fabrication shops and says its own shops keep dust below federal limits. Cambria's own records show dozens of air tests above that level. A jury found Cambria partly liable in Jordan's case, and California regulators are moving toward a ban, but a House bill would throw out the lawsuits. Jordan's father now has silicosis too and still cuts the stone because customers want it. |
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| In 2006, 14-year-old Uli Gobin Hernández broke his arm snowboarding in Germany, took hours to wake from surgery, and began losing control of his muscles. His mother, Yaremy Hernández Castillo, a Venezuelan-born doctor, spent years hunting for a cause as colleagues dismissed her. A second surgery left Uli unable to walk or talk. In 2020, her cousin's son suffered the same brain damage after knee surgery. Both boys had received sevoflurane, a widely used anesthetic gas, and both carried a rare mitochondrial mutation common in Venezuela's Carabobo state. Spanish researchers working with Yaremy found that cells with the mutation are hypersensitive to the drug. Children of Venezuelan maternal ancestry have since died after routine surgery in Chile and the US. The mutation may also help solve how anesthesia works, which no one fully understands. |
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