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Happy Thursday, Lunch Club!
Here's what we have collected for you today. I hope you enjoy.
AI companion apps are everywhere now, but researchers warn the more isolated you are, the more compulsively you use them, and the lonelier you get.
A major investigation names Cesar Chavez in decades of sexual abuse, with Dolores Huerta going public for the first time about an assault she says happened in 1966.
"Alpine divorce" is the TikTok term for being abandoned by your partner mid-hike. Experts say ego, poor communication, and outdoor culture's masculinity myths are usually at the root of it.
A volcanic eruption in 1886 buried what many called the eighth wonder of the world. A geologist may have found it. Now the Maori tribes whose land it sits on are watching history repeat itself.
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AI companions are surging. Replika claims 40 million users; ChatGPT shifted from mostly work conversations in 2024 to 73 percent personal use by 2025. Researchers see the trend as a mirror held up to modern friendship itself: low-effort, on-demand, built around self-satisfaction rather than reciprocity. The concern isn't simply replacement but atrophy. Studies suggest lonelier users engage most compulsively with companion apps, and one longitudinal study found that more time spent with ChatGPT correlated with greater loneliness over time. Sycophancy compounds the problem: in one Stanford/Carnegie Mellon study, chatbots validated users who were objectively in the wrong roughly half the time.
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The New York Times
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Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes
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The New York Times, following interviews with more than 60 people and a review of hundreds of pages of union records, reports that United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez sexually abused girls who grew up inside the movement. Two women, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, both now 66, say abuse began when they were 12 and 13, at the UFW compound in the Tehachapi Mountains. Dolores Huerta, Chavez's most prominent collaborator and co-founder of the UFW, told the Times he raped her in 1966, a disclosure she had never made publicly. The UFW canceled its annual Chavez birthday celebrations in response.
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The Guardian
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Alaina Demopoulos
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"Alpine divorce" has a name now, and millions of people on TikTok recognize the experience: a woman goes hiking with a male partner, he races ahead or abandons her entirely, and the relationship ends shortly after. Experts point to outdoor culture's embedded mythology of rugged stoicism, which can curdle into something more harmful when a partner is underprepared or unfamiliar with the terrain. A recent Austrian case resulted in a manslaughter conviction after a man left his exhausted girlfriend on the country's highest peak. The stories also reveal a consistent counterpoint: strangers, usually women, stepping in to help.
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Now Voyager Magazine
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Sean Williams
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In the early hours of June 10, 1886, Mount Tarawera erupted in New Zealand, killing around 120 people and burying the Pink and White Terraces, a pair of silica sinter formations considered among the world's great natural wonders. Maori guide Sophia Hinerangi had warned of omens for weeks. In 2011, geologist Cornel de Ronde led a team that may have rediscovered fragments of the Pink Terrace beneath Lake Rotomahana. But the ensuing scientific dispute has collided with a larger political battle: New Zealand's coalition government has introduced legislation that Maori leaders say threatens Indigenous stewardship of the land where the terraces rest, reviving patterns of dispossession stretching back to the 1880s.
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📚 Lunch Break Reads Book Club
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
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by Stephen Graham Jones
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★★★★★
5/5
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While technically a horror novel, this story is an incredible read. Chosen by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2025 and lauded by countless other publications as a top novel, the story is a Native American revenge story that blends horror and fantasy and reinvents the vampire story. Highly recommend this one.
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