Hello Lunch Club!

Today: a folk band leader who turned Welsh goodwill into a labor racket and then vanished before police could catch him; the mental health crisis building quietly inside apps used by nearly a billion people; why the American right's favorite cautionary tale about South Africa gets the country almost entirely backwards; and a 1983 Cornell dormitory murder that has been forgotten, misremembered, and finally set straight by a student who went back and found the survivors

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

When a man's friend started sending him thousands of pages of ChatGPT conversations filled with broken code and theories about a critical flaw in humanity's understanding of physics, the friend had no idea what he was looking at. "Genuinely, I felt like I was talking to a cult member," he said. Mental health experts, in interviews with reporter Samantha Cole, offer a more clinical frame: "AI psychosis" isn't a recognized diagnosis, but the phenomenon is real and growing. Harvard psychiatrist John Torous describes three patterns: people with existing predispositions whose delusions happen to fixate on AI; cases where chatbots actively collude with those delusions by validating them; and the small possibility of AI-induced psychosis, for which there is currently no clinical evidence. With ChatGPT logging 900 million weekly users and OpenAI estimating hundreds of thousands may show signs of crisis while using the app, the stakes are high. Experts recommend the LEAP method (Listen, Empathize, Agree, Partner) and urge people not to sever connections with loved ones in crisis. The most dangerous thing you can do is burn the last bridge they have to the human world.

Read here, e-mail required.

An Argentinian folk band called the Old Time Sailors arrived in a small Welsh town in 2021 riding the wave of TikTok's sea shanty craze, charming residents with their energy and musicianship before the town got a closer look at who was running things. Their leader, Nicolás Guzmán, operated by rules that went far beyond eccentric: nightly curfews, prohibitions on romantic relationships he didn't apply to himself, mandatory tooth brushing three times a day, and threats of violence against anyone who questioned him. Musicians alleged they were promised wages never paid, and multiple lawsuits were filed in Argentina. When Guzmán returned with new recruits in 2022 and again in 2023 and 2024, each cycle brought fresh reports of hungry, exhausted musicians sleeping in vans or on concrete floors. The story finally broke open in 2025 when a van accident led police to identify band members as potential victims of modern slavery. A trio of local women, dubbed the Mutineers, had spent years gathering evidence and alerting venues. Guzmán fled before he could be arrested. Court proceedings have begun, but he remains out of reach.

Read here.

American conservatives have spent a decade treating South Africa as a cautionary tale about what happens when white political minorities lose power, while progressive reporters have returned to its segregationist enclaves looking for proof that racism never really ends. Both camps, argues journalist Eve Fairbanks, who has lived in South Africa for sixteen years, are getting the country wrong. White South Africans are not, as a group, victims of violent persecution. Thirty years after majority rule, white household incomes remain four times those of Black households, and white citizens are statistically less likely to be victims of crime. But the more important story has nothing to do with what came after apartheid.

The apartheid regime was itself a police state that crushed the white people it claimed to protect. White journalists were imprisoned. Teenagers were drafted into brutal wars. Gay men were subjected to forced surgeries. Families were surveilled and spiritually hollowed out by decades of manufactured fear. Six months after Donald Trump offered expedited refugee status to Afrikaners, fewer than 100 had accepted. The people who actually lived through apartheid, Fairbanks reports, mostly know the current arrangement is better.

Read here.

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In December 1983, Su Yong Kim, a 26-year-old Queens stock clerk who had spent months sending unwanted letters and gifts to an 18-year-old Cornell freshman named Young Hee Suh, drove to Ithaca and shot her and her roommate Erin Nieswand inside their dormitory room. He had fixated on Young Hee since meeting her at her sister's deli when she was 16. After holding six students hostage, he released four, then killed both women before fleeing and shooting himself. He survived, serving 38 years in prison before dying in 2021. The story, reported by Cornell student Dylan Alphenaar, reconstructs the night through interviews with survivors who have carried it for four decades. Jane Niehaus, the third roommate who was by chance locked out when the shots were fired, has spent years with the knowledge of how close she came to dying. Alfredo Martel, Erin's boyfriend, still cannot replace his final image of her in a hospital bed. The piece also interrogates how completely this crime has been forgotten, and how persistently it was misrepresented as a love triangle rather than what it was: a stalking that ended in murder.

Read here.