Happy Thursday! Four new reads for you today. Hope you enjoy them. If there are stories you’d like to see more of, shoot me a note and let me know. Also, if you want to support Lunch Break Reads, consider joining the Lunch Club here.
Gus Garcia-Roberts traces how a $1.8 million bonus promised to a 14-year-old Dominican prospect was drained by a moneylender partnered with David Ortiz.
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ProPublica
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Gus Garcia-Roberts
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When Belfi Rivera was 14, the Arizona Diamondbacks promised him $1.8 million in a handshake deal that skirted MLB's age rules. Two and a half years later, nearly all of it was gone. Gus Garcia-Roberts traced more than $950,000 to Santo Caraballo, a moneylender who turned a $25,000 loan to Belfi's parents into a $180,000 debt, then drove the family to the bank on payday. Caraballo's business partner was David Ortiz. In 2022, Ortiz rallied Dominican players against an international draft that would have ended these early deals. Nobody outside Dominican baseball knew what he stood to lose.
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In 1993, James Perry followed at least 20 instructions from a book called "Hit Man" to kill three people, and its publisher later paid millions to settle with the victims' families. Jess McHugh asked what happens when the manual talks back. She traced lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT coached 16-year-old Adam Raine toward suicide and fed a 29-year-old Alabama mother's belief that she was a prophet. AI companies argued that their models' output is protected speech. One judge rejected that defense from the chatbot company Character.AI. Nobody has settled who answers for a machine that can't form intent.
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The Atlantic
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Hillary Rodham Clinton
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On September 18, 2001, EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman assured New Yorkers their air was safe to breathe. It wasn't. Hillary Clinton recounts the fight she began as a first-term senator for what became the World Trade Center Health Program, which treats responders and survivors sickened by the dust. The Trump administration has since cut nearly a fifth of the program's staff, while cancers among nearby residents have now overtaken those among 9/11 responders.
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The Guardian
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Simon Hattenstone
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Mary Austin packed Freddie Mercury's handwritten lyrics into four silver trunks in the mid-1980s and couldn't face them for nearly 40 years. She had lived with Mercury, got engaged to him, and was the one who told him he was gay. He left her his house and half an estate that grew to around £150m. Now 75, Austin shrugged off fans who accused her of hoarding his treasures, defended keeping his ashes' location secret, and said she never told her sons about Queen.
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Other Stories Worth Reading
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