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LUNCH BREAK READS

THURSDAY, APRIL 9, 2026

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Happy lunch break. Four really great stories today. Some of these are long, so you’ll want to bookmark them for later because they are all worth reading.

  • A group of young Buffalo Catholics spent months casing a federal building, hid in a sweltering attic for 36 hours, and raided two draft boards in their underwear — then talked a sympathetic judge out of sending them to prison.

  • The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation controls the finances of American humanities to a degree that would alarm the scholars who built it. Academics describe quietly rewriting their research to fit the foundation's politics, because the alternative is no funding at all.

  • Balin Miller's father watched his son die on a looping TikTok video, then wrote one of the most honest pieces of climbing grief you'll read.

  • Researchers have known for nearly 20 years that roughly one in four "vegetative" patients are conscious and aware. Almost none of them are ever tested for it.

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01 • ~48 Minute Read
Atavist Magazine Stephen Wood
The Buffalo Raiders
In 1971, a group of working-class Catholic activists broke into the federal building housing Buffalo's draft boards, hiding in the attic for 36 hours before raiding the offices in their underwear. Inspired by brothers who had died in Vietnam and shaped by Jesuit educations and countercultural disillusionment, they destroyed files, filled a kiddie pool with Rit Dye, and attempted to raid Army Intelligence. An FBI informant blew the operation. Five were arrested; two escaped. At trial, they represented themselves before a Catholic judge who suspended their sentences. They kept raiding draft boards for years.
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02 • ~25 Minute Read
The Atlantic Tyler Austin Harper
The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation dispenses $540 million in humanities grants annually, dwarfing the federal NEH's $78 million budget. As other major donors have retreated, Mellon has become the field's de facto monopoly funder. Under president Elizabeth Alexander, it has sharply pivoted toward social-justice grantmaking, pushing academics to reframe research in activist terms to win funding. Scholars describe reshaping projects to fit Mellon's priorities or lose access entirely. The result: a single private foundation now dictates the direction of American arts and letters.
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03 • ~19 Minute Read
Climbing Magazine David Moudy-Miller
Sea of Nightmares: My Son Died Climbing. Now, I Wrestle With ‘What If.’
Balin Miller's father watched his son die on TikTok after Balin slid off the end of his rope soloing El Capitan's Sea of Dreams in October 2025. David Moudy-Miller writes with raw clarity about raising a kid to climb, teaching him that fear without injury equals fun, and the "what ifs" that now haunt him. He mourns not just Balin's death but what the video showed: his son nearly saving himself, almost grabbing the haul line. The essay moves between grief, self-interrogation, and an imagined survival.
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04 • ~34 Minute Read
The New York Times Katie Engelhart
Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew
A landmark 2024 study found that roughly one in four behaviorally unresponsive patients are actually conscious, their aware minds trapped in uncooperative bodies. The condition, called cognitive motor dissociation, has been known since 2006 but remains almost entirely outside standard clinical care. Through the story of Aaron Williams, a 30-year-old declared vegetative after cardiac arrest, the piece traces the gap between what neuroscience knows and what hospitals do, the diagnostic errors that reach 40 percent, and the ethical questions about whether such patients should be asked whether they want to live.
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