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Happy Tuesday, Lunch Club!
We have a good selection of stories on deck for today’s lunch break.
A bolt of lightning carries 100 million volts and passes through the body in milliseconds, but for some survivors, the fallout lasts decades and the medical establishment has almost nothing useful to say about it.
Russia is severing itself from the global internet layer by layer: Starlink cut off, YouTube slowed, WhatsApp blocked, and now Telegram, the app that coordinates actual frontline combat, heading for a ban.
Bubba Copeland was the mayor of his Alabama hometown, the pastor of a beloved church, and someone who cross-dressed in private. A conservative outlet published his photos. Two days later, he was dead. Esquire spent months in Phenix City finding out who he really was.
Scientists have begun cloning extinct animals and freezing others for future revival. The technology is moving faster than anyone has thought through what "extinction" actually means anymore.
As always, I appreciate your feedback as we grow this community. Never hesitate to hit reply and tell me what you thought about today’s edition.
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A lightning bolt carries 100 million volts but passes through the body in milliseconds, fast enough that most people survive. What follows can last decades. Survivors report phantom water running down their limbs, food that tastes like cardboard, crushing headaches, and an inability to sweat. Standard MRI scans detect nothing. Most doctors have no idea what to do. At a survivors' conference in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, attendees swap DIY remedies: salt packets, Warheads candy, extended sauna sessions. Gary Reynolds has been struck four times. The statistical odds of that are essentially zero, yet someone in the support group's Facebook page stopped counting at 13. The most lasting damage may be philosophical: how do you rebuild a sense of fate after the universe singles you out for something so impossibly unlikely?
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POLITICO
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Ekaterina Bodyagina
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SpaceX cut off Starlink access for Russian military units last month, choking satellite internet traffic inside Ukraine by roughly 75 percent. Then Russian regulators began throttling Telegram, the app that coordinates drone strikes, volunteer fundraising, and frontline supply chains. A full ban is expected in April. In its place, authorities are steering Russians toward MAX, a state-backed messaging app widely assumed to funnel communications to security services. Critics from across the political spectrum, including a longtime Kremlin ally, have called the move self-sabotage. Russia's censorship architecture works not as a single firewall but as thousands of internal filters, allowing officials to slow services without formally banning them. VPN use has surged. Demand for pagers, walkie-talkies, and paper maps is rising. The trajectory points toward something resembling, in one analyst's phrase, a large nuclear-armed North Korea.
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Bubba Copeland was the mayor of Smiths Station, Alabama, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in neighboring Phenix City, and by all accounts the person his community called first in a crisis. He was also, privately, someone who cross-dressed and posted to Reddit communities under an alter ego. On November 1, 2023, a conservative Alabama outlet called 1819 News published an exposé. Two days later, Bubba shot himself. Mark Warren's account of what followed is a portrait of a town in grief and a church that refused to abandon its pastor, and a reckoning with what happens when a media operation built on ideological warfare encounters an actual human being. The founder of 1819 News had received a prison sentence for attempted murder before finding religion and starting the site. He never responded to Esquire's requests for comment.
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In 2003, scientists cloned the last Pyrenean ibex from tissue frozen before her death. The kid was born alive and died within minutes from a lung defect. Some researchers now argue the species was never truly extinct, that frozen cells represent "evolutionary torpidity" rather than permanent loss. Historian Sadiah Qureshi traces how cryopreservation, from a 1949 discovery involving glycerol and rabbit semen to today's Frozen Zoo at San Diego holding 10,000 samples, has quietly redrawn the boundary between alive and gone. Last year, Colossal Biosciences put genetically modified grey wolves on the cover of Time and called them de-extinct dire wolves. Scientists mostly rolled their eyes. But in October, the IUCN voted against a moratorium on releasing engineered organisms into the wild. The technology is moving faster than the ethics. Qureshi's core concern is pointed: if extinction becomes reversible, will we bother preventing it?
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📚 Lunch Break Reads Book Club
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Project Hail Mary
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by Andy Weir
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★★★★
4/5
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Project Hail Mary was published in 2022, but with the forthcoming movie scheduled for release in the U.S. this week, I thought it would make for a good inaugural book club suggestion. I am an avid science fiction fan, but this story goes beyond what you expect out of a sci-fi novel. It is a page-turner that you will not want to put down, and the twists will keep you going. Have you read it, or are you going to give it a try? Shoot me a note and tell me what you think.
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Disclosure: as a Bookshop.org affiliate, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
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Other Interesting Stories
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