Welcome back, Lunch Club.

For those of us across the U.S. buried under the snow, I wish you the best of luck in digging out!

Today's edition takes us from Hollywood tragedy to internet radicalization, from artisan craft to satirical self-awareness. We explore a family destroyed by addiction and privilege, teenagers spreading Nazi mythology through memes, the near-impossible economics of handmade oboes, and how a sketch comedy show accidentally defined a city's identity.

Happy Reading,

Brett

Nick Reiner spent a decade cycling through 18 rehab facilities while living in his parents' Brentwood guesthouse, funded by Rob and Michele Reiner's relentless attempts to save their son from addiction. Starting with marijuana at 14, he progressed to heroin, crack cocaine, and homelessness in Maine, punctuated by violent outbursts and treatment center expulsions. His parents never stopped trying, hiring sober companions, paying for broken chapel windows, driving him to internships at "Family Guy." They co-wrote the film "Being Charlie" about his struggles, hoping art might offer salvation.

Nick remained trapped between privilege and self-destruction, alternating between gratitude and rage, once hurling a turkey leg at his father during Thanksgiving dinner. Rob confessed to a friend that their home felt like a "mansion prison," yet feared forcing psychiatric intervention. Last year, after repeatedly asking old friends to reconnect, Nick was arrested for murdering his parents in that same Brentwood compound where he'd always returned between relapses.

Read here.

Heinrich Himmler funded a 1938 SS expedition to Tibet searching for Agartha, a mythical underground Aryan civilization he believed proved white racial superiority. Nearly a century later, Agartha memes have exploded among teenagers on Instagram and TikTok, racking up millions of views with supercuts of UFOs, Nordic-looking people, and anti-Semitic imagery set to remixed 1980s music.

Many young posters claim ignorance of the Nazi origins, treating it as "absurd brainrot humour," but researchers trace every viral Agartha account back to neo-Nazi communities. The memes function as a gateway: algorithms funnel viewers from seemingly innocent posts toward overtly racist content. White supremacists celebrated when the Trump White House shared an Agartha-style Christmas meme about mass deportations. Polling shows 18-to-22-year-olds express anti-Semitic views at rates 10 points higher than the general population. A Jakarta teenager who bombed a mosque had "For Agartha" scrawled on his toy gun. Whether posted ironically or seriously, the memes normalize Himmler's fantasy of a white ethno-state for a new generation.

Read here, free for LBR readers.

Alfred Laubin built his first oboe in 1931 by hand-drilling the bore and melting his wife's silverware for keys. His son Paul continued the tradition, blowing pipe smoke through joints to test for cracks, finishing at most four oboes his final year before dying alone in his workshop mid-instrument. In 90 years, only 2,050 Laubins were made. Now entrepreneur Matt Phelan has spent $1 million trying to turn the artisan operation profitable while preserving its reputation for dark, covered tone. The oboe, with 500 precisely fitted parts, is the orchestra's most mechanically complex instrument.

Laubin's traditional process requires weathering raw wood billets for at least 10 years before shaping them. Phelan's controversial solution: Laubinite, an injection-moldable composite engineered to mimic grenadilla's sonic profile. He hurled prototype top joints against concrete to demonstrate their resilience. Fired craftsman Alex Laubin, who witnessed his father's near-religious devotion to traditional methods, has appealed his dismissal twice. Phelan plans to sell Laubinite joints at $4,700 as backups and eventually produce entirely synthetic instruments, betting innovation can save a company that never prioritized profit over craft.

Read here.

Portlandia premiered 15 years ago, transforming a West Coast city known for cheap rent and craft beer into a national punchline. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's sketch show depicted a bizarro Portland where Kyle MacLachlan played mayor, characters obsessed over chicken provenance, and hipsters manufactured causes to rebel against. The city initially embraced the attention: the mayor appeared on camera, the Portland Gay Men's Chorus sang the theme song, bike tours sprang up.

But what landed as in-jokes from insiders quickly felt like pointed mockery to outsiders. By 2016, feminist bookstore In Other Words posted "Fuck Portlandia" on its door, calling the show trans antagonistic as the country descended toward fascism. The show's reductive lens worked for spoofing locavore brunchers but flattened serious issues like gender equality into trivial concerns. Portlanders blame it for gentrification, though the city's displacement problems predate the show by decades. The real damage was branding Portland as a place of eccentric worries rather than substantive protest culture. Ironic given one episode revealed the entire city as conceptual art started by its founders in 1851, a self-aware acknowledgment the show understood its own reductiveness.

Read here.

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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.