Happy Hump Day.

Today’s edition is anchored by a chilling piece of longform reporting on the deadliest avalanche in California's modern history, and the still-unanswered question of why trained guides led 15 people into terrain that experts say should have been a clear no-go. Alongside that: a first-year teacher's honest account of trying to figure out what AI means for his English classes, a behind-the-scenes look at Paris's cutthroat annual baguette competition, and an OPB investigation into a mysterious New Age group in southern Oregon that has been charging followers up to $80,000 for enlightenment while serving them unidentified substances at all-night ceremonies.

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

Peter Baker spent a year training to be a high school English teacher in Chicago, arriving mid-career after 15 years as a novelist, and found himself immediately consumed by the question every English teacher now faces: what to do about AI. The debate he encountered was loud and polarized, split between those who see chatbots as an existential attack on the thinking skills school exists to develop, and those who argue ignoring the tools does students a disservice. Baker spent most of his training year lurching between both camps.

Observing a veteran teacher, he watched students reflexively paste essay prompts into ChatGPT, encountered AI-hallucinated citations, and felt the specific despair of reading a paper while trying to determine its origins rather than its meaning. But he also watched a room of American 14-year-olds get genuinely gripped by All Quiet on the Western Front, phones in pouches, laptops away, the room "quietly crackling." By the end of his student teaching semester, Baker had landed somewhere provisional: AI-skeptical but not ideologically pure, still uncertain, and increasingly convinced that the most honest thing a teacher can offer students is a direct conversation about what these systems actually are, and who built them.

Read here.

On February 17, a group of 15 skiers left the Frog Lake Backcountry Huts above Lake Tahoe during a blizzard and were swept by an avalanche that killed nine of them, the deadliest such event in California's modern history. The group, which included experienced recreational skiers and four guides from Blackbird Mountain Guides, departed despite a Sierra Avalanche Center warning that had rated danger at "high" since 6:29 a.m., actively discouraging travel near avalanche terrain. The guides chose a route home that, according to multiple backcountry experts, carried obvious and avoidable risk, passing below slopes loaded with unstable snow after weeks of warm temperatures had created a weak layer underneath fresh accumulation. Snow was falling at four inches per hour, twice the rate experts treat as an elevated-danger threshold. Standard protocol calls for exposing only one person at a time when crossing avalanche terrain; investigators found all nine bodies clustered within a 20-by-20-foot area. The Nevada County sheriff's office and California's workplace-safety agency are investigating potential criminal negligence. Blackbird's owner has not spoken publicly. The surviving guide, the one person who knows why the group took that specific route, has not responded to interview requests.

Read here, free for LBR readers.

Every January, Paris holds a competition to determine the best baguette in the city, and it is treated with the seriousness the French apply to most things involving bread. The 33rd Grand Prix de la Baguette drew 143 contestants this year, each submitting two loaves made to legal specification: flour, water, yeast and salt only, baked and sold on the same premises. Thirty pairs were disqualified for failing length and weight requirements before the blind judging even began. A panel of bakers, journalists, past winners and lottery-selected members of the public scored entries on appearance, bake, crumb structure, smell and taste, with particular attention paid to whether the interior air pockets had the right beehive geometry. This year's winner was Sithamparappillai Jegatheepan of Fournil Didot in the 14th arrondissement, a baker originally from Sri Lanka. It's a pattern: the 2023 winner also emigrated from Sri Lanka, and previous Grand Prix champions have come from Algeria, West Africa and Tunisia, often running bakeries in neighborhoods far from the tourist center. The prize carries 4,000 euros and a year's contract supplying bread to the French president's residence. A woman has never won.

Read here, free for LBR Readers.

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In 2020, a spiritual group called TwinRay relocated from California to Ashland, Oregon, opened a downtown storefront called The Haven, and began selling gold-flecked "living water" at $111 a bottle alongside supplements with names like "Immortal Monotomic" that claimed to treat cancer. The group's two leaders, born Mia Deuschle and Harley Forster, had reinvented themselves as robed divine beings named Shekinah Ma and Akasha Sananda, claiming to be the reincarnated Jesus and Mary Magdalene who reunited when a ray of light struck the Sphinx in Egypt. Former followers who spoke with OPB reporter Leah Sottile described spending tens of thousands of dollars on yearlong "ascendantship" courses, restricted diets, and in-person retreats at the group's $2.6 million gated compound, where sleep-deprived attendees were given an unlabeled substance at "elixir ceremonies" that kept them awake all night. One woman estimates she spent $80,000 before leaving; another spent roughly $30,000. The leaders threatened a TikTok critic with a cease-and-desist warning that her family had been under surveillance for a year. The property went into foreclosure after the leaders failed to repay $1.6 million to the original seller. The FBI has declined to confirm or deny any investigation.

Read here.