Happy Hump Day, Lunch Club!

We've got the inside account of Maduro's final weeks in power, and how a series of miscalculations ended with him in a Brooklyn courtroom. We're also looking at the young women's mental health crisis that keeps getting eclipsed by the conversation about struggling young men, a sprawling look at sumo wrestling's nationalism problem and what it reveals about Japan's complicated feelings about who belongs, and a personal essay about welcoming a son into the world on the same day you lost your brother.

Brett

The public conversation about struggling young men has a blind spot: young women are doing worse by several key measures, and almost nobody is talking about it. Women report higher rates of depression and anxiety than men, are more likely to attempt suicide, and hold roughly two-thirds of America's student loan debt. A woman with a bachelor's degree earns about the same as a man with an associate's degree. The gender pay gap persists even within the same field.

The cultural backdrop has gotten harder too. Abortion rights are gone, manosphere rhetoric is louder, and a 2024 Gallup poll found 40 percent of U.S. women ages 15 to 44 would move abroad permanently if given the chance, four times the rate from 2014. Many young women were raised believing they could do anything, then entered adulthood just as that promise started unraveling. Their crisis is real, Hill argues, but it's quieter and high-functioning enough that it keeps getting ignored. Women show up as a comparison point in the masculinity debate, never as its subject.

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Japan's national sport has become a proxy for the country's identity anxieties. Mongolian wrestlers have dominated sumo's upper ranks for decades, winning six of the last eight grand champion titles. When a Japanese-born yokozuna named Onosato was finally promoted last year, fans and media treated it as a cultural event as much as a sports one. Joshua Hunt spent the summer attending training camps and the Nagoya grand tournament, where he found that enthusiasm for a Japanese champion was less about ethnic superiority than fear of national decline.

The political backdrop was hard to ignore. A far-right party called Sanseito, which built its following through anti-immigration YouTube content, won parliamentary seats that summer by stoking fears about foreign workers. Most tournament fans described their feelings about the party with one word: "fukuzatsu," meaning complicated. When a Ukrainian refugee named Aonishiki eventually won a later tournament, it added another layer to a sport whose founding myth, it turns out, involves a foreign god invading Japan and losing.

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Nicolás Maduro spent his final weeks in power convinced a deal with Washington was still possible. Based on interviews with a dozen of his senior officials and allies, this reconstruction shows how a leader who had survived coups, sanctions, and mass protests fatally misread Donald Trump.

The turning point was a November phone call. Maduro interpreted Trump's cordial small talk as goodwill and time bought. Trump interpreted Maduro's nonchalance as dismissal and moved toward force. When a Brazilian billionaire relayed a direct warning from Marco Rubio to leave, Maduro bristled and ignored it. He continued staging public performances, including dancing to electronic music while chanting "yes peace, not war," videos Trump reportedly found infuriating. Maduro believed his Russian and Chinese weaponry would make a Caracas strike too costly. He was expecting, at most, hits on oil infrastructure. Instead, 150 U.S. aircraft captured him at a military compound on January 3rd. He told a Brooklyn judge two days later that he considered himself a prisoner of war.

Read here, free for LBR Readers.

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Maria Zorn's son was born on July 24th, the same date as her late brother Tomm's birthday. Tomm died of an accidental overdose more than a decade earlier. She had not planned this overlap, and when the induction date made it inevitable, she wasn't sure what to feel.

The essay moves between hospital rooms and quiet Denver mornings, Beanie Baby sorting sessions and neighborhood walks with her mother. Zorn captures early parenthood with precision: the compulsive step-counting on stairs, the hours of phone-scrolling with an infant on your chest, the urge to text a dead brother about a realtor she looked up on Zillow out of boredom. Her son resembles Tomm slightly, especially outside, squinting against the light. What the piece lands on is grief's relationship to love: becoming a mother didn't shrink the loss, it expanded her capacity for both. Every year they'll mark two birthdays together, one just starting, one for the man who never got to be his uncle.

Read here.