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The weekend is in sight! Happy Thursday, Lunch Club. We have four interesting stories for you to choose from today:
Sixty children from a Mariupol orphanage were evacuated by a militia-linked American pastor, ended up in Switzerland, and their Ukrainian relatives still can't reach them.
Will Wright has spent a decade and over a million dollars of his own money building a game that maps your psyche from your memories, and it keeps almost existing.
The fraternity brothers who watched Tim Piazza suffer for twelve hours, searched the internet for his symptoms, and called 911 only when he "looked fucking dead.”
One last thing: we have sent 144 issues of the newsletter since we launched last year. If you’ve enjoyed even a few of them, consider making your membership into the Lunch Club official by making a contribution. We have some exciting new subscriber-only perks on the way this year, and if you upgrade your membership, you’ll be the first to hear about them and have immediate access.
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Now Voyager Magazine
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Lynzy Billing
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When Russia invaded Mariupol, sixty children from Wings of Hope orphanage were swept into a chaotic evacuation that ended with them in Poland, under the informal custody of Matt Shea, an American pastor with documented ties to far-right militias and domestic terrorism investigations. Most of those children still have living relatives in Ukraine who have been trying, for three years, to find them. The children are now in Switzerland. Authorities block contact, withhold addresses, and demand paperwork that families cannot produce.
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Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims, has spent a decade and over a million dollars of his own money building a game called Proxi, which asks players to log their memories so an AI can map the hidden architecture of their psyche. The project ran out of funding in late 2024, leaving a skeleton crew working unpaid. Wright, now 66, is still at it. The game remains unfinished, possibly unfinishable, and that may be part of the point.
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The Atlantic
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Caitlin Flanagan
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Tim Piazza, a 19-year-old Penn State sophomore, fell down a flight of stairs during a Beta Theta Pi hazing event in February 2017. His fraternity brothers watched him suffer for nearly twelve hours, cleaned up evidence, and searched the internet for medical symptoms before finally calling 911. He died the next morning. Security cameras recorded everything. The story is not really about one rogue chapter. Fraternity hazing is nearly universal, and the industry's strict liability rules give members every incentive to delay calling for help.
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Outside Magazine
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Frederick Dreier
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Reaching the summit of Everest used to require years of hardcore alpinism. Today, it increasingly resembles preparing for an Ironman: months of low-intensity aerobic training, weighted pack hikes, periodized strength work, and coaches who track everything on TrainingPeaks. The piece follows two men in their late fifties, one a Colorado farmer practicing ladder crossings in crampons between his goats, the other a recovering alcoholic training in Florida without a mountain in sight, both headed to Nepal this spring.
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