Happy Tuesday.

Today’s reading covers a lot of ground, but everything here is worth your lunch hour. Tom Junod, the magazine writer behind some of the most memorable longform journalism of the last thirty years, has finally published his first book, and it turns out the story he’d been avoiding was his own father.

Also: a deep look at AI’s growing role in IVF, which is either a breakthrough for struggling parents or a step toward designer babies, depending on who you ask. A forensic philosopher makes a compelling case that the psychopath, as we imagine them, doesn’t actually exist. And a small British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean you’ve probably never thought about has somehow become a flashpoint in the U.S.-U.K. alliance.

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

Tom Junod spent thirty years dodging a book. The legendary magazine writer behind “The Falling Man” and the Fred Rogers profile that became a Tom Hanks film had signed with Knopf in the mid-90s, collected advances, and kept not delivering. The idea was always almost right, then someone else got there first, then life intervened. Now at 67, Junod has finally published what writer John Hendrickson argues was the only book he was ever going to write: a 400-page reckoning with his father, Lou, a philandering, volatile traveling salesman who spent decades as both the sun and the black cloud of the Junod household.

Hendrickson spent two and a half days with Junod in Atlanta and on Long Island, reconstructing how a man who made his career excavating other people’s full messy truths kept finding reasons to avoid doing it to his own family.

Read here.

Phineas Rueckert opens with a personal revelation: like Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first IVF baby born in 1978, he too was conceived through the procedure, something his mother only told him recently. The disclosure launches a thoroughly reported examination of what happens when artificial intelligence gets added to an already fraught, expensive, and emotionally devastating process.

The fertility industry has moved fast. A baby was born last year through a fully automated IVF procedure, with AI selecting the sperm and embryos most likely to succeed. Companies like AIVF are scoring embryos on 1-to-10 viability scales using deep-learning models trained on millions of cases. The pitch is compelling: fewer failed rounds, lower costs, less trauma. But a large randomized trial published in Nature found AI and human embryologists chose the same embryo two-thirds of the time, with nearly identical pregnancy rates.

Read here.

The concept of psychopathy is one of the most researched diagnoses in mental health history, and according to an Aeon essay by a University of Toronto forensic epistemologist, it may also be almost entirely wrong. Despite hundreds of empirical studies, virtually every major claim about psychopaths has either been refuted or failed to replicate. The most durable pop-science claim, that psychopaths lack empathy, collapses under scrutiny: a systematic review of 66 studies involving over 5,700 clinically assessed individuals found their performance in empathy experiments was indistinguishable from normal controls.

The diagnosis traces back to an 1786 description of “moral derangement” by Benjamin Rush, and it has always served a cultural function as much as a clinical one. We want a category for people who do senseless, evil things. The 1990s gave us Natural Born Killers, Silence of the Lambs, and American Psycho, and the diagnosis surged alongside them. But null results keep piling up. The essay argues psychopathy functions as a “zombie idea,” debunked repeatedly yet impossible to kill, because it satisfies a deep need to locate evil somewhere outside the range of ordinary human behavior.

Read here.

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When the U.S. wanted to launch strikes on Iran from Diego Garcia, Britain said no. The delay was brief, but the fallout was not. The episode exposed a controversy largely ignored in America: Britain’s pending handover of Diego Garcia, the most strategically important U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean, to the island nation of Mauritius.

The deal, signed after a 2019 International Court of Justice ruling, would transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, which would then lease Diego Garcia back to Britain for 99 years. Supporters say it satisfies international law and secures the base long-term. Critics counter that Mauritius’s claim is legally shaky and that the country’s deep economic ties to China and India make it an unreliable security partner. The base sits only hours of flying time from the Middle East and can accommodate the heaviest bombers and nuclear submarines. Trump’s Truth Social outburst demanding Britain not “GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA” drew attention to the issue, but the piece argues that rage-posting won’t untangle the trap that British postcolonial guilt and American inattention have quietly built together.

Read here, free for LBR readers.