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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 2026 | Sponsored by | Morning Brew |
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Happy Hump Day, Lunch Club!
We have a good selection of stories on deck for today’s lunch break.
A writer discovers that pressing his tongue against a phone screen for 15 minutes a day actually cuts snoring in half, and learns the hard way what happens when he stops.
After her mother read the proofs of her novel and asked to have her ashes scattered off Antarctica, Maggie Shipstead spent three years figuring out how to honor that request, and wasn't prepared for what she felt when she finally did.
A sharp, detailed account of how Elon Musk ran DOGE like a dungeon-crawler speedrun, what it actually built inside the federal government, and why most of it outlasted him.
Kennedy Lashley is 22, trained in animation, and has watched every program she enrolled in get canceled or gutted. Her story is not unusual.
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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THE ATLANTIC
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Gilad Edelman
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At least 25 percent of adults snore regularly, and for writer Gilad Edelman, the condition turned out to be mild obstructive sleep apnea. Diagnosed after an at-home sleep study, he faced three treatment paths: a CPAP machine (effective but widely abandoned), a custom mouth device, or orofacial myofunctional therapy, the idea that targeted tongue and throat exercises can retrain the airway. Skeptical but intrigued, he downloaded the Airway Gym app, designed by a Spanish otolaryngologist, and spent 15 minutes a day pressing his tongue against his phone screen. Within two weeks, his snoring had dropped by half. He quit when life got busy. It came back immediately. He's back on the app.
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The New York Times
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Maggie Shipstead
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After reading the proofs of her daughter's novel about a pilot whose ashes are scattered in the Southern Ocean, Maggie Shipstead's mother made a quiet, specific request: when she died, she wanted her own ashes dispersed off Antarctica. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in July 2022, and three and a half years later, Shipstead boarded a ship at the tip of Argentina with her husband, father, and brother to carry it out. The essay follows that journey and the grief folded inside it: the logistics and bureaucracy, the family dynamics reshuffled by loss, and the sharp, unexpected feeling of devastation when the task was finally done and the tether to her mother was cut.
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The Guardian
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Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian
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Elon Musk arrived in Washington in January 2025 treating the federal government like a buggy video game: something to speedrun, glitch through, and rewrite from inside the code. His Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by teenage coders and mid-level managers from his own companies, pursued a three-part playbook of delete, automate, and integrate. The goal was centralizing all federal data into a single repository and using AI to replace human decision-making. In practice, what Doge built was expanded surveillance infrastructure and a deportation tracking system. Musk left after 130 days with a black eye. Most of the apparatus he constructed stayed behind.
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Toronto Life
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Kennedy Lashley, as told to Jes Mason
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Kennedy Lashley is 22, the daughter of a Marvel comics artist, and she graduated into a labor market that has methodically dismantled every foothold available to young creative workers. Her pandemic-era high school offered ghost classes and a graduation ceremony posted to YouTube. Her 3D animation program at Mohawk was gutted mid-enrollment. A post-graduate screenwriting program she was accepted to was canceled three days before it started. Her entire graduating cohort works in hospitality or retail. The broader data backs her experience: Canadian youth unemployment in 2025 hit its highest point in three decades outside of the pandemic. She still works at a bakery. She keeps drawing anyway.
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Other Interesting Stories
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