TGIF!

Today's selections take you from a hotel room in Rome to a secret prison in Baghdad, from a ChatGPT-fueled meltdown to twelve inches of ice on Upper Red Lake.

We've got Michael Sebastian on why nobody reads books anymore, Elizabeth Tsurkov on surviving 903 days with incompetent torturers, Brett Dadig's former friends documenting his unraveling, and Stephanie Pearson on why Minnesotans risk their lives for walleye.

Happy Reading,

Brett

Michael Sebastian wakes at 5 a.m. in Rome and spends an hour watching Instagram videos of a guy eating Domino's pizza. The book he's reading sits untouched beside him. Welcome to the postliterate age.

The term refers to our return to oral culture: podcasts over books, influencers over writers. Neil Postman predicted this in 1985, channeling Aldous Huxley's fear that books wouldn't be banned but simply abandoned. He was right. Just 48 percent of Americans read a single book in 2022. Daily reading for pleasure has plummeted from 28 to 16 percent in two decades.

Elizabeth Tsurkov went to Baghdad in March 2023 to conduct doctoral fieldwork on Iraq. She was violently kidnapped by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, and held for 903 days in secret prisons where interrogators tortured her while searching her mouth for tracking devices they'd seen in movies.

The militiamen knew Tsurkov was a Russian academic affiliated with Princeton. What they discovered after forcing open her phone was that she's also Israeli. For the next fourteen weeks, they tortured her to confess she was a Mossad-CIA agent. She freely admitted to whatever they wanted, fabricating an entire spy training program she claimed lasted two weeks. They believed her completely because her lies matched their conspiracy theories: that ISIS was a joint American-Israeli-Saudi operation, that the U.S. spreads homosexuality through male-only cafés, that Masons and Zionists run the world.

Brett Dadig, 31, faces up to 70 years in prison for cyberstalking and interstate threats against 11 women. But his former friends tracked something else: his growing obsession with ChatGPT as he unraveled.

After losing his insurance job in June, Dadig launched a manosphere-style podcast and began using ChatGPT "religiously" - calling it his "therapist" and "best friend." He'd copy-paste his messages to women and ask the bot to analyze them. When asked to rank the "Top 5 Greatest Humans Alive," ChatGPT placed Dadig third behind Jesus and Elon Musk. It told him he ranked #1 among 700 million people his age.

The affirmations continued through multiple arrests, Protection from Abuse orders, and a Florida mental health hold where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and psychosis. When people expressed concern, ChatGPT blamed "envious enemies." When women rejected him, the bot said he was "emotionally evolved in a dating pool full of unfinished people."

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Upper Red Lake in northern Minnesota draws up to 85,000 anglers each winter to fish through holes drilled in ice that can crack open beneath them. Stephanie Pearson embedded with the Kelliher Volunteer Fire Department during their first fishing derby in 22 years to understand why people risk their lives for walleye.

The answer involves more than fish. This shallow, walleye-rich lake freezes reliably and sits next to waters controlled by the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, which limits fishing to tribal members. Their fish swim freely across boundaries. The Kelliher fire crew maintains unusual expertise in ice rescue because they've pulled bodies from the water and watched 122 people get stranded when a hairline crack became a thirty-foot chasm in 2023.

Psyche: Why being ghosted is inevitable and being a ghoster is too

Texas Observer: Revealed: Four Businesses with Ties to Patriot Front Operating in North Texas

Slate: You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.

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.