Today we've got something for just about every corner of your brain. From a Las Vegas arena packed with college students racing through Sudoku formulas to win cash prizes, to the quiet, careful work of reuniting Western North Carolina flood survivors with baby photos and coffee mugs dredged from rivers.

We've also got a librarian making a sharp case that the supposed death of reading is really a design failure we could fix if we wanted to, and Sam Kriss spending time in San Francisco with the founders, rationalists, and chaos agents building a world that rewards pure audacity over nearly everything else.

I want to hear from you. What do you like about Lunch Break Reads? What do you hate? What kinds of stories are you most interested in? Drop me a line at [email protected]!

Brett

Every December, hundreds of college students descend on the Las Vegas Strip not to gamble but to compete in high-stakes spreadsheeting. The Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge, now in its third year, has grown into a genuine spectacle: a packed esports arena, an official parade down the Strip, trading cards, and NIL deals. Competitors race through complex 30-minute cases, writing formulas to sort massive datasets, solve 20 Sudoku tables simultaneously, or plan hypothetical trips for 500 people. No mice allowed, only hot keys.

The field draws students from around the world, including defending champion Beni Weber, who traveled from rural Austria, and University of Wisconsin senior Nathan Wang, who documented every keystroke on a selfie stick for a future YouTube audience. Arizona entered as the team favorite, having stacked its roster with veterans from prior championship runs. But in a sport where one misplaced character unravels an entire formula, favorites don't always hold. A business school from Madagascar, INSCAE, blitzed the bonus questions and claimed the team title. South African veteran Pieter Pienaar took the individual crown. Weber finished fourth and went skiing.

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More than a year after Hurricane Helene tore through Western North Carolina, the rivers and creeks of the region are still giving up what the floodwaters took. The environmental organization MountainTrue, working with $10 million in state funding, now employs 91 workers across 12 counties to clear debris from local waterways. Among them is Mandy Wallace, a former river guide and trained anthropologist who has become the team's artifact recovery technician.

Her job is to find the owners of what the crews pull from the muck: baby photo albums, coffee mugs, pottery tools, military jackets, football throw pillows. Wallace photographs each item with museum-like care and posts them to a Facebook group, where people across the region slowly reclaim pieces of their lives. So far, she has facilitated 30 reunions. One Asheville woman recognized a mud-caked photo of her infant daughter. A man got back the Reba McEntire mug he had used every morning for 30 years, found a mile downriver, not even chipped. Wallace is building an interactive map to show how far each object traveled, a way of illustrating, as she put it, the interconnectedness of everyone.

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The hand-wringing about reading's death is everywhere, and university librarian Carlo Iacono thinks the diagnosis is almost entirely wrong. Yes, the numbers are bad: the share of Americans reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40 percent over two decades. But the problem isn't screens. It's specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons. Notification systems, infinite scroll, and variable reward schedules were deliberately engineered to fragment attention in service of advertising revenue. That's not a property of technology. It's a policy decision, and it can be reversed.

Iacono traces the familiar panic back through history: penny dreadfuls in the 1800s, novel-reading in the 1700s, Socrates worrying that writing would rot human memory. Each wave used identical rhetoric, and each predicted disaster failed to arrive. What's genuinely new today isn't shallow content, which has always existed, but delivery mechanisms actively built to prevent sustained thought.

His prescription is architectural rather than nostalgic: design environments that make depth as accessible as distraction. Libraries, he argues, aren't becoming obsolete. They're becoming more essential as the rare spaces optimized for thinking rather than extraction.

Read here.

Imagine this. You open your phone to an alert. It says, “you spent $236,000,000 more this month than you did last month.”

If you were the top bidder at Sotheby’s fall auctions, it could be reality.

Sounds crazy, right? But when the ultra-wealthy spend staggering amounts on blue-chip art, it’s not just for decoration.

The scarcity of these treasured artworks has helped drive their prices, in exceptional cases, to thin-air heights, without moving in lockstep with other asset classes.

The contemporary and post war segments have even outpaced the S&P 500 overall since 1995.*

Now, over 70,000 people have invested $1.2 billion+ across 500 iconic artworks featuring Banksy, Basquiat, Picasso, and more.

How? You don’t need Medici money to invest in multimillion dollar artworks with Masterworks.

Thousands of members have gotten annualized net returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8% from 26 sales to date.

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_{*Based on Masterworks data. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd}

Sam Kriss travels to San Francisco to report on a new generation of tech founders, and what he finds is less a meritocracy than a mood. The central figure is Chungin "Roy" Lee, co-founder of Cluely, a company that began as a tool for cheating on technical job interviews before pivoting into an AI assistant for office workers. Lee filmed himself using it to land an Amazon internship, got suspended from Columbia, dropped out, and raised tens of millions in venture capital. He is 22 and couldn't get through Huckleberry Finn.

Kriss uses Lee to examine a doctrine now circulating in Silicon Valley: that AI will sort humanity into a small overclass of "highly agentic" people who simply do things, and a much larger group rendered useless. Intelligence and expertise are losing value. What investors want now is a personality type that runs through obstacles and asks forgiveness never. The piece moves between Lee's disheveled offices, a rationalist communal house where philosopher Scott Alexander worries about AI extinction, a teenage founder running a sperm-racing startup, and a gleeful provocateur who extorted gaming hardware from Sam Altman by sheer force of absurdity. Together they sketch a world that has learned to make the absence of reflection look like a virtue.

Read here.

The Atlantic (2003): Columbia's Last Flight 🔓

Mother Jones (2020): I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book

Texas Monthly (1989): The Work of the Devil