BREAKING NEWS: National Meteorologist Punxsutawney Phil, this morning saw his shadow, predicting six more weeks of winter. Bundle up!

Kicking off the week with some interesting stories:

Happy reading,

Brett

Catherine O'Hara, who died recently at 71, built her career creating characters rather than playing herself, from SCTV's diverse impressions to Moira Rose's wig-wearing eccentricity on Schitt's Creek. In a 2019 interview, she described initially resisting doing a series, worried about being "locked down" after years of creative freedom at Second City. Her SCTV years were marked by casual sexism: she'd whisper ideas to male castmates who'd test them for laughs before she'd claim ownership. Women weren't paid as writers in season one despite doing the work, a pattern John Candy helped expose and fight.

The Christopher Guest films she starred in were entirely improvised from story outlines, with actors discovering their characters together on set. She negotiated hard for Home Alone 2 after realizing the first film's success, taking less money to avoid being available for the entire 12-week shoot. The middle class of acting salaries had vanished by then; she was getting independent film offers for $1,500 weekly, far less than her earliest film work paid decades earlier.

Read here.

Fortified scam compounds across Southeast Asia house thousands of workers running elaborate fraud schemes targeting victims worldwide, but the line between perpetrator and victim inside these facilities proves impossible to draw. A Chinese man named Li claimed he was trafficked, beaten, and had his blood drained seven times; his story went viral before medical experts and investigators found inconsistencies, yet he clearly emerged broken from genuine captivity.

Researchers Ivan Franceschini and Ling Li document how people move fluidly between categories: children trafficked for ransom, women forced into sexual slavery while running scams under threat, criminals who themselves get kidnapped and tortured, and victims compelled to recruit others as the price of freedom. A 15-year-old boy was sold into a compound and made his family's debt worse through ransom payments. A Vietnamese woman who suffered in compounds became a recruiter herself. The system creates what Primo Levi called a "grey zone" of moral ambiguity, where structural forces produce both victims and perpetrators simultaneously. Understanding this complexity is essential for addressing the scam economy's root causes rather than simply punishing individuals caught in its machinery.

Read here.

Nearly three of every four restaurant orders in America now happen outside restaurants, with delivery usage roughly doubling since 2019. Readers described ordering single items impulsively (a chocolate lava cake for $15, a coffee) while expressing guilt about costs to drivers, the environment, and their own finances. Kiely Reedy spends $200 to $300 weekly on delivery from her $50,000 salary, depleting savings and reducing socializing. Kevin Caldwell and his husband spend $700 weekly because burned-out parenting and work leave no time to cook; his 4-year-old can navigate the Chick-fil-A app.

Working parents treasure the time saved, while Yale students build social lives around shared delivery orders. Research shows delivery platform arrivals correlated with 9 percent less daily cooking time. Drivers report pay of $2 to $4 per delivery regardless of distance, with tips adding only a few dollars. Austin Layne supplements his data analyst salary by delivering while paying off his own delivery debt. Will Parks spent a third of his 2024 income on ordering in before quitting cold turkey and discovering cooking, which "feels more adult."

Read here, free for LBR readers.

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.

Explore offerings

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

At Montana's Medicine Rocks State Park, a designated Dark Sky Sanctuary, darkness reveals what artificial light conceals: our fundamental insignificance and connection to everything else. The author describes lying beneath unpolluted night skies where stars defeat any sense of distance or time, experiencing what feels like the dissolution of individual boundaries. More than two-thirds of animals are nocturnal, and 80 percent of migratory birds travel at night, making darkness essential for countless species.

Sabre Moore spent three years gathering data to secure the sanctuary designation, measuring light pollution under strict conditions. She believes isolation forces people to reckon with themselves, free from distraction. The author discovers that protecting dark skies isn't about preserving something that can be extinguished but about creating refuge for understanding, a place where we learn from what we cannot see. Darkness becomes not an absence but a presence that absorbs the boundaries between inside and out, teaching us that our distinct manner of being is perishable.

Read here.

The internet gives you everything and helps you understand nothing. The Lunch Break Reads Weekend Edition solves that problem. Every week we pick one theme that actually matters and build you a curated reading list that goes deep instead of wide. Underground book markets. Deep-sea mining's geopolitical consequences. The kind of stuff that makes you dangerous at dinner parties.