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Happy Monday, Lunch Club!
We have four stories queued up for your lunch break today. Kind of a bleak selection, but important and thoughtful reading nonetheless.
Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man: Esquire profiles Bob Rutan's rise from broke actor to Macy's Santa to corporate executive and back to destitution, revealing the fraternity of broken men who find something like salvation in the red suit.
The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun: Politico exposes Stardust Solutions' $75 million plan to spray reflective particles into the stratosphere by 2026, dimming sunlight to combat warming with unknowable consequences.
Russia's Africa Corps Continues Wagner's Atrocities in Mali: AP documents systematic rapes, beheadings, and organ harvesting by Russian mercenaries now under direct Kremlin control, while international oversight has completely evaporated.
The Moral Authority of Animals: Noema argues that animal ethics predate human morality and might offer remedies for our collapsing social contracts, from capuchin monkeys rejecting unfair pay to police dogs recognizing injustice faster than their handlers.
Grab your lunch. Let's go.
By David Gauvey Herbert
This sprawling Esquire profile traces Bob Rutan's extraordinary arc from desperate actor to beloved Macy's Santa to corporate executive overseeing Santaland and back down again. The piece reveals the unspoken fraternity of men who play Santa at Herald Square, where failed actors, combat veterans, and broken fathers find something approaching redemption in a twenty-dollar-an-hour gig. Through interviews with dozens of former Santas who maintain an omertà about their work, the narrative captures those transcendent moments when grown men swear they truly became Santa Claus, particularly during encounters with terminally ill children or families in crisis. Rutan's downfall plays as Greek tragedy, complete with an estranged daughter he hasn't heard from in seven years. The emotional center hinges on a single December night in 1991 when something inexplicable happened in Rutan's cottage, an encounter he would recount for years afterward.
By Karl Mathiesen and Corbin Hiar
Politico examines how a 25-person Israeli-American startup has clandestinely engineered technology to disperse reflective particles into the stratosphere and literally attenuate the sun's rays to cool the planet. Stardust Solutions has amassed $75 million and claims it could commence atmospheric testing by April 2026, with full deployment feasible by 2035, all while operating under near-impenetrable opacity and with virtually no regulatory constraints.
By Monika Pronczuk and Caitlin Kelly
This brutal AP report from the Mauritanian border reveals how Russia's Africa Corps has simply continued Wagner's campaign of terror in northern Mali, despite Moscow's claims of reform. Thirty-four refugees described indiscriminate killings and sexual violence, with two showing footage of settlements torched by "white men" and others discovering relatives' corpses with organs excised. The testimonies are visceral: fighters shouting "pes"—Russian for dog—while seizing teenage girls, a mother whose daughter hasn't unclenched her fists in eight months, a woman who fled so frantically she left her infant behind. The Fulani communities find themselves crushed between jihadist militants demanding loyalty and Russian-backed forces treating any hesitation as collaboration. Mali's shift from Western allies to Russian contractors hasn't suppressed extremism but it has eliminated oversight. UN peacekeepers are gone, the ICC has no jurisdiction, and journalists can't access the regions where villages burn and bodies accumulate.
by Jay Griffiths
This Noema essay argues that animals possess innate ethical systems predating human morality, offering desperately needed instruction for our collapsing social contracts. Police dog bites his own handler's arm during a 2022 beach confrontation where the officer attacks an unarmed teenager—the canine recognizing injustice more clearly than his uniformed partner. From there, the piece assembles a cross-cultural catalog of animal morality: capuchin monkeys refusing cooperation when denied equal rewards, dwarf mongooses allocating grooming time based on sentinel duty performed, baboons exacting revenge on the specific vehicle that killed their troop member three days earlier. Indigenous philosophies position humans as "younger brothers of creation," a cosmology vindicated by wolf societies that practiced elderly care and non-kin cooperation millions of years before Homo sapiens emerged. The political models proliferate—red deer requiring 62% consensus before moving, honeybees conducting rigorous fact-checking before collective decisions, fieldfares executing coordinated aerial defecation strikes against predatory crows.
That’s it for 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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