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Welcome back, Lunch Club. We have a great selection of stories for you today that run the gamut of lighthearted to disheartening. I hope you enjoy.
Fake vials of Keytruda, the world's bestselling cancer drug, have made their way into hospitals across Mexico and Nepal, with at least one confirmed death. The drug costs up to $416,000 per treatment course in the U.S.
A retired neuroscientist with cancer spent a year trusting Perplexity over his oncologist. His son, who writes a newsletter about AI risks for a living, couldn't stop him.
Stick around at the bottom for a few podcasts I have enjoyed recently from Slate, The New York Times and Serial, and WBUR.
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The Atlantic
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Caity Weaver
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After surveying 555 people across 13,000 miles of travel, a reporter set out to settle the question of which restaurant serves the best free bread in America. The answer, backed by both raw poll data and her own palate: the cranberry-walnut loaf at Parc in Philadelphia (and its sibling, Le Diplomate in D.C.). Along the way, the piece visits Joël Robuchon's 16-variety bread cart, Lambert's Cafe's famous thrown rolls, and a steak house in Atlanta whose bread is perfect and whose Diet Coke pricing is unforgivable.
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The Alamo Drafthouse, once celebrated for its strict no-phone policy and reverent theatrical atmosphere, now requires customers to use their phones to order food via QR code during movies. Film critic David Ehrlich traces how Sony's acquisition, mass layoffs, failed union drives, and a cost-cutting pivot produced a policy that functionally destroys what made the chain worth visiting. His account of taking his son to see a Mario movie at the Brooklyn location doubles as a precise autopsy of how corporate ownership ruins a brand by eliminating everything that made it distinctive.
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ICIJ
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Nicole Sadek and Isabella Cota
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Keytruda, the immunotherapy drug that generated nearly half of Merck's $65 billion in 2025 revenue, has spawned a global counterfeiting epidemic. ICIJ found that patients and hospitals in Nepal, Mexico, and elsewhere have unknowingly received fake vials filled with antifungal medicine. One Nepalese woman almost certainly died receiving fraudulent doses her family paid thousands for. Merck prices a two-year course at up to $416,000 in the U.S., making the drug effectively inaccessible in lower-income countries and, investigators say, lucrative enough to fake that criminal networks now treat oncology drugs like high-margin contraband.
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The New York Times
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Teddy Rosenbluth
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Ben Riley runs a newsletter warning people about AI's risks. His father, Joe, a retired neuroscientist with cancer, used Perplexity to research his own diagnosis and concluded, wrongly, that his doctor's recommended treatment would kill him faster than the disease. He declined chemotherapy for over a year. When Ben contacted the researchers whose work the AI had cited, they said the summary was riddled with fabrications. Joe eventually began treatment too late, and died. Ben published the story anyway, certain the lesson mattered even as four major tech companies simultaneously launched consumer health AI tools.
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