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Join the Lunch Club
Founding Member - 17 Spots Left
The first 50 Lunch Club members lock in at $5/month forever. 33 spots are gone. Members get ad-free reading, the Weekly Top 5 every Saturday, Source Notes, and access to the LBR reading lists — curated archives of the best true crime, investigative, and profile journalism on the internet.
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The Guardian
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Amelia Gentleman
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Markuss Hussle takes a 50 percent cut of the women he manages on OnlyFans, then sells $8,000 courses teaching other young men how to do the same. Amelia Gentleman spent months inside this shadow industry of self-styled managers, talking to former recruiters and creators who describe relentless pressure to produce more explicit content, contracts that trap women for years, and Telegram groups where performers are bought and sold like inventory. One former recruiter puts it plainly. It's exploiting, it's grooming, it's predatory.
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The Atavist
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Mitchell Sunderland
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In March 2015, Denise Huskins was kidnapped from her boyfriend's Vallejo home and held for ransom. When she was returned two days later, police called the whole thing a hoax and compared it to Gone Girl. Mitchell Sunderland reconstructs what actually happened: a meticulous abduction carried out by a man who had spent months studying hostage protocols, built a replica of a kidnapping kit from film, and sent investigators a recording before they could dismiss it. The couple sued Vallejo PD. The real kidnapper eventually confessed. What the police chose to believe, and why, is the more disturbing story.
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Within hours of an infant's death, anti-vaccine activists scan obituaries, Facebook posts, and local news for any mention of a recent vaccination. Then they make contact. Brandy Zadrozny tracked how these recruiters approach bereaved mothers with condolence messages and a ready explanation, building relationships over months before steering them toward movement communities where grief becomes advocacy. Some mothers eventually reject the narrative. Others become its most effective messengers. What keeps the cycle running is that nobody is checking the actual cause of death.
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New York Magazine
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Max Read
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A Disney employee named Michael Scheuer was hacked. The attacker planted child sexual abuse material on his devices, then tipped off law enforcement. Scheuer was arrested. Disney fired him before the truth surfaced. Max Read uses the case to trace the emerging crime of fabricated digital evidence: how attackers exploit the reflexive trust investigators place in files found on a suspect's machine, and why the standard defenses ordinary people believe protect them offer almost no protection at all.
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Signal Cleveland / Bellingcat
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Jonathan Moens
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Ashley Delgado died on a Cleveland street in 2023 with a folded scrap of tan powder tucked into her bra. The drug was a nitazene, a synthetic opioid up to 40 times stronger than fentanyl that barely shows up on standard toxicology screens. Jonathan Moens spent months tracing how Ohio became ground zero for these compounds: Chinese chemical suppliers exploiting regulatory loopholes, a Maserati crossing from Canada stuffed with 100,000 pills, and a street market that barely knows what it's selling. Dealers call it a brand. The coroner's office is still catching up.
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