Happy Monday, Lunch Club!

Today’s stories include:

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the start of the Russian-Ukraine War. We are doing a deep dive into the latest reporting out of Kyiv and what has changed for the world order since Russia began the investigation.

Brett

Joshua Hunt started injecting semaglutide in April 2025 weighing 291 pounds, a decade into class III obesity that had slowly erased the person he used to be. The piece traces two parallel stories: a man losing nearly 80 pounds over nine months, and a writer recovering a sense of self he'd buried under Carhartt pants and deliberate invisibility. Hunt grew up poor in the Pacific Northwest, where secondhand clothes were a necessity that became an identity, then a genuine source of joy through the grunge era and into his 20s. Gaining 100 pounds didn't kill his interest in clothes so much as redirect it into a strange habit of buying things two sizes too small, as if aspirational shopping could substitute for actual change. Ozempic did more than suppress his appetite. It ended a Coca-Cola addiction overnight, eliminated compulsive spending, and quieted what he describes as a life lived at maximum volume. A January 2025 study using Veterans Affairs data found long-term GLP-1 users showed reduced rates of substance-related disorders, suggesting the drug may affect impulse control centers in the brain. Hunt ran again for the first time in five years, bought a bright orange rain jacket instead of his usual gray or navy, and sat across a dinner table in London thinking about someone other than himself.

Read here.

For about 60 years, cannabis lore has celebrated Big Sur Holy Weed as a singular strain bred by a reclusive monk named Perry who mixed Mexican and Himalayan seeds on the cliffs of the California coast. Writer Lester Black spent a year trying to verify the story, interviewing farmers, breeders, and historians across the state. What he found instead was a myth built on a foundation of oral histories, prohibition's destruction of records, and the genuine but undocumentable creativity of hippie farmers who bred new strains from seeds smuggled in from around the world starting in the late 1960s. Breeder Mojave Richmond, who grew up in Big Sur, told Black there never was a single strain by that name; it was more a class of cannabis grown in a place and time. Monasteries tied to the legend denied any connection. The last legal cannabis farmer in Big Sur lost his permit a week after Black visited his plants. Meanwhile, California has spent $2.7 million documenting cannabis heritage, hoping to create appellation protections similar to French wine regions, though the program remains years from launch. Corporate tobacco companies are already mining the same genetics.

Read here. E-mail required.

Oklahoma passed the Survivors' Act in 2024 offering imprisoned domestic violence victims a path to reduced sentences if they could prove abuse was a substantial contributing factor in their crime. Pamela Colloff's investigation follows the law's first year in practice. Lisa Rae Moss, convicted in 1990 for her role in her husband's killing after years of documented rape and physical terror, walked free in January 2025. Her case became the high-water mark. April Wilkens, the woman whose case inspired the law, spent 27 years in prison after killing the man who had raped, beaten, and stalked her across two years, with police doing almost nothing to stop him. Despite a tape recording in which her abuser admitted to the violence, and testimony from a sitting federal judge who had personally seen Wilkens' injuries, a Tulsa judge denied her resentencing. The Tulsa County district attorney spent more than $16,000 fighting her case. Text messages later obtained through public records requests showed the judge had been texting with prosecutors about the case. Five of the first six applicants after Moss were denied relief. Wilkens is now appealing to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.

Read here.

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A 21st birthday party in Balmoral, a 280-person farming town in western Victoria, ended with a woman named Elise being raped by two men she had known since primary school. Luke Merryfull and Shaun Bloomfield were found guilty by a jury in 2019 and sentenced to prison. But a key witness, the community's bush nurse who had collected Elise from the scene in the immediate aftermath, came forward days after sentencing with a new statement containing a previously unmentioned exchange. Her recollection that Elise had perhaps consented to one of the men triggered a successful appeal. A retrial in 2022 returned the same guilty verdict, but by then the delays had accumulated enough that the judge handed down community corrections orders rather than prison time. In total, the men served roughly 19 months. Throughout, Balmoral's football community largely closed ranks around the accused. Elise's family was frozen out of social life, her mother refused service at a local business, her teenage brother cornered at the pub. The club declined to be interviewed. A decade on, two members have broken ranks to say the town's response sends a message to anyone who might consider coming forward. Elise, now living interstate with a campervan and two dogs, is slowly finding her way back.

Read here.