Hello Lunch Club!
Today's selection of stories includes:
A food scientist spends 13 years perfecting a hexagonal tortilla fold while Taco Bell engineers debate the ideal breaking point of Doritos dust, revealing how American innovation worships portability over everything.
Two trans programmers abandon grad school to save humanity from AI apocalypse, end up on a rotting tugboat in financial ruin, and their twisted philosophy leaves seven people dead or jailed across America.
A guy goes backstage at a Seattle music festival, fantasizes about throwing baked potatoes at famous people, and realizes we all accept whatever social hierarchy we're assigned—even when the plane's filling with smoke.
Germany rebuilds its war machine for the first time since WWII because Russia's invading neighbors and America stopped being reliable, raising the uncomfortable question of whether democracies can rearm without resurrecting their demons.
Grab your lunch. Let's go.
By Antonia Hitchens
This 2023 New Yorker piece chronicles the intricate world of Taco Bell's product development, centered on Lois Carson's 13-year quest to perfect the Crunchwrap Supreme. The article reveals how corporate food scientists engineer portable meals through meticulous testing of "rheological properties" like crunchiness and spreadability, while navigating constraints of assembly-line speed and ingredient scalability. Beyond Carson's hexagonal folding breakthrough, the story illuminates the broader machinery of "stunt food" culture—from Doritos Locos Tacos requiring Home Depot paint sprayers to the "magic paper" that prevents cheese from adhering during grilling. What elevates this beyond mere novelty reporting is its examination of how fast food mirrors American values: our worship of convenience, our conflation of innovation with progress, and our susceptibility to manufactured nostalgia.
By Tessa Stuart and illustration by Matthew Cooley
This sprawling investigation traces how two trans programmers—Ziz Lasota and Gwen Danielson—went from living on a tugboat dreaming of saving humanity from AI apocalypse to becoming central figures in a string of murders across America. What begins as an almost sympathetic portrait of brilliant misfits priced out of San Francisco's Rationalist community darkens into something far more disturbing: the story of how Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas about artificial intelligence and decision theory metastasized into justifications for lethal violence. The piece methodically documents the collapse: failed boat communes, financial desperation, a protest at a Rationalist retreat that turned into a SWAT standoff, and ultimately a theory called "Timeless Decision Theory" twisted into logic that murder could retroactively prevent past wrongs. By the end, at least seven people are dead or jailed, including a Border Patrol agent and an elderly landlord stabbed through the chest.
Dirt: Very Important People
By Mike Nagel
This essay chronicles a weekend trip to a Seattle music festival where the author grapples with his own insignificance while navigating the ecosystem of celebrity. What begins as comedy—fantasizing about hurling a baked potato at a rockstar's face, watching possibly-drowning people from a beach bench—sharpens into something more cutting: an examination of how we internalize hierarchy. The author ping-pongs between VIP treatment backstage (free Cheez-Its, proximity to fame) and economy-class indignities (being known only as "22b"), revealing how quickly we accept whatever status we're assigned. The prose sparkles with deadpan observations about our compulsion to hunt celebrities like rare wildlife, punctuated by genuinely funny asides about his father's encounters with M*A*S*H actors and Howard Keel. But beneath the humor lurks genuine discomfort about class stratification, captured perfectly in the contrast between backstage goddesses preaching unity and the author's recognition that "you'll know it when you're back where you belong."
The Atlantic: The New German War Machine
By Isaac Stanley-Becker and photographs by Hannes Jung
This deeply reported piece chronicles Germany's wrenching transformation from pacifist nation to Europe's largest military power, spurred by twin shocks: Russia's Ukraine invasion and America's abandonment under Trump. The author—whose great-grandfather fled Nazi Germany with a red J stamped on his passport—watches German defense officials scramble to rearm while haunted by the question of whether weapons built for democracy might someday serve authoritarianism. The juxtaposition proves unsettling: suicide drones displayed in minimalist showrooms, recruitment ads on pizza boxes, German troops returning to Lithuania where Wehrmacht killing squads once operated, all while the far-right AfD gains ground with pro-Moscow sympathies.
That’s it for this today.
Really hope you enjoyed the selection of stories today. I am always interested in hearing from you. If you have thoughts on how I can make this email even better, do not hesitate to reach out.
Brett
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