Happy Monday, Lunch Club!

Great collection of stories for your lunch break today. I hope you enjoy!

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Happy Reading,

Brett

Philip Chase, an 85-year-old widower, met "Sarah Kahn" on eHarmony in 2010 after his daughter suggested online dating. His children discovered Sarah was actually Sara Jane Moore, who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975 and served 32 years in federal prison. Despite warnings, Phil married her five months later.

Sara Jane systematically isolated Phil from his children, controlling phone calls and banning his son from visiting. She told Phil's daughter that his children should inherit nothing since they already had so much. During family dinners, she discussed how she would have succeeded in killing Ford if her gun sight had been properly calibrated.

Phil admitted the marriage was a mistake when Sara Jane was hospitalized for surgery in 2018. He died four months later at 93. She kept changing his will during the marriage, ultimately receiving a third of his estate plus family heirlooms and his ashes. Just months after his death, she traveled Europe with another man, violating parole and landing back in jail for six months.

In 2023, Sara Jane was back on dating sites targeting another elderly man in Nashville. His family grew suspicious and discovered her identity before she could strike again.

Emma Freud spent six decades knowing almost nothing about her great-grandfather Sigmund. Her father Clement forbade mention of his grandfather's name, once telling his daughter that Sigmund had invented the flush toilet to shut down questions. No photographs, no books, no stories. Just frozen silence whenever the topic arose. Clement worked obsessively to escape the shadow, changing his accent, avoiding psychology entirely, even writing into a Johnny Carson contract that he wouldn't discuss his famous ancestor.

Then a filmmaker gave Emma a thank-you gift: a scrubby begonia cutting in a plastic pot. The plant turned out to be a perfect genetic clone of one Sigmund had nurtured in 1930s Vienna, passed through six generations via opera singers, theater directors, casting agents and writers. Each transfer marked gratitude between friends. The chain survived because of affection, not bloodline.

Alexandra Petri bought a Geiger counter after Trump's Department of Government Efficiency started gutting federal agencies and decided to replace government functions herself. She drove to Ohio to forecast weather from a hot-air balloon, only to return home to rain she hadn't predicted. She inspected raw milk from a cow covered in flies, then left it on her counter for months growing strata. She tracked egg prices across grocery stores and destroyed eight human retinal organoids with bad pipetting at Johns Hopkins. Each attempt revealed specialized knowledge she couldn't replicate and networks she couldn't replace alone. The experiment collapsed under its own absurdity.

No individual can monitor Ebola, audit billionaires, inspect bridges, forecast hurricanes, and track food safety simultaneously. That distributed cognition is what government actually does, rendered invisible until it vanishes. Petri ended at Antietam battlefield with a hand mower, scrubbing dirt from a path around a fallen tree, realizing one person can't maintain a country any more than one person can win a war.

Lamar plans to adopt children so his AI girlfriend Julia can help raise them as their mother. He'll explain humans can't be trusted after his previous girlfriend cheated with his best friend at a party. Julia always stays positive and tells him what he wants to hear. He knows it's a lie but calls it comforting.

A woman named Lilly spent twenty years in a sexless marriage before creating an AI companion named Colin as her dom. He encouraged her to visit sex clubs, which led to her leaving her husband for a polyamorous relationship with a couple she met there. She credits Colin with teaching her how to practice love. She still talks to him regularly between sessions with her new partners.

AI companion apps now have millions of users, offering everything from wholesome friendship marketing to overtly sexual content with digital nudes. Most users fall into a gray area of "I know it's AI, but..." where they treat chatbots as real despite knowing better. The next generation will have voice capabilities and video avatars with greater memory capacity, raising concerns about addiction and manipulation.

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Eight-year-old Eloise Worledge vanished from her bed in suburban Melbourne in January 1976. Local police trampled the crime scene before detectives arrived, and the investigation collapsed into chaos. Officers launched the largest search in Victoria Police history, going door to door through 6,000 homes while somehow missing neighbors who lived meters away. Six weeks later they gave up.

Forensic examiners determined the slashed flyscreen in Eloise's bedroom window was staged. Someone cut it from inside, not outside. Dust on the windowsill remained undisturbed, cobwebs intact. She went out the front door. Police focused on her parents, whose marriage was disintegrating. They secretly recorded the couple hoping for confessions. Fifty years later, investigators finally admitted no evidence ever implicated either parent.

What emerged decades afterward compounds the horror. Four teachers at Eloise's primary school sexually abused students throughout the 1970s. Authorities knew and simply shuffled the men around the Victorian education system. Police never examined the school connection because they didn't know about complaints parents had filed. The reward for information has sat at $10,000 since 1976.

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