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Happy lunch break. Here's what we're reading today:
A 1981 arcade championship where three women proved they belonged — and one of them beat the men's top score by nearly 800 points, then negotiated circles around the prize committee anyway.
The head lice panic machine: how a decades-long turf war between parents and entomologists keeps schools recommending treatments that stopped working years ago.
One Kyiv neighborhood through the coldest, darkest stretch of the war — told through the people who stayed when everyone else left.
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Truly Adventurous
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Corey Mead
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Halloween weekend 1981, Chicago: three women competed in the inaugural Atari World Championships while the creator of Centipede, gaming's first female designer, was rushed to a courthouse to defend her game against Australian counterfeiters. Ok Soo Han, Julie Winecoff, and Faith Sloan faced an industry that barely acknowledged their existence, let alone their skill. Han won the women's division with a higher score than the men's champion — and walked away with less than a quarter of his prize money. Her workaround was as clever as her gameplay.
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Four women filed sexual misconduct complaints against Washington OB-GYN Dr. Mark Mulholland between 2022 and 2024, each describing aggressive or sexually charged pelvic exams. The state medical commission knew. His employer, Kadlec clinic, had its own file dating to 2018. Neither acted with urgency. Mulholland kept seeing patients until May 2025. At least 84 lawsuits have since been filed. A former colleague left the practice because management wouldn't act. The commission finally restricted his license in September 2025, three years after the first complaint arrived.
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The Atlantic
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Daniel Engber
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Head lice cause almost no medical harm, yet they've generated decades of school panics, useless treatments, and millions of lost school days — most triggered by misdiagnosis. The story traces two competing factions: parent advocates who pushed aggressive no-nit policies and entomologists who spent careers trying to calm everyone down. The calmer side has mostly prevailed in policy, but the fear hasn't moved. Permethrin, now largely useless due to resistance, is still what many schools recommend. Effective treatments exist. The bugs just live in our heads rent-free either way.
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The New York Times Magazine
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C.J. Chivers
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After a January 8 missile barrage depleted Ukraine's Patriot interceptors and destroyed Kyiv's heating plants, residents of Troieshchyna spent weeks in apartments cold enough to frost their breath. C.J. Chivers reports from inside one neighborhood: a Soviet-era building where a Chernobyl widow died in a drone strike, a displaced woman with nowhere to go, and a yard keeper who finally evacuated when her last heat source failed. Russia's ceasefire gesture lasted four days before 450 more weapons launched. Restoring full electrical capacity, one expert estimates, will take five years.
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