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LUNCH BREAK READS

01 • 26 Minute Read
Slate Molly Olmstead
The Mystery of “Medbeds”
Illustration for Slate's story on the medbeds conspiracy theory
In September 2025, President Donald Trump posted, then deleted, an AI-generated video announcing "medbed" hospitals and a national medbed card for every citizen. Medbeds don't exist, but followers of the QAnon conspiracy movement believe Trump will soon release these secret machines that cure any illness. Erika Looney's mother stopped taking her diabetes medication and kept promising that Erika's disabled son would soon be "fixed," until Erika asked her to move out. The idea traces to Randy Cramer of Sedona, Arizona, who said in 2014 that a medbed regrew his arm while he served in a secret Marine space program on Mars. His story drifted from UFO and New Age forums into QAnon, where scammers now sell fake appointments.
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02 • 20 Minute Read
The Sunday Long Read Taleen Mardirossian
The Mother Tongue of All Secrets
Lead image for The Mother Tongue of All Secrets
In the last months of her life, an Armenian grandmother with advanced Alzheimer's kept asking for someone named Tony, even after she forgot her granddaughter's name. When lucid, she denied knowing him, and her children said they didn't either. The daughter of Armenian Genocide survivors, she made reviving the Armenian language her life's work, even banning English at home in California. Eventually an aunt revealed that Tony was a Syrian neighbor she had loved as a girl in Azaz, Syria. Because he wasn't Armenian, her family moved to Aleppo and married her off to an older Armenian man. In a Los Angeles Armenian nursing home, she still insisted Tony couldn't live there because he wasn't Armenian.
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03 • 28 Minute Read
GQ Zach Baron
Tom Cruise: Hollywood’s Most Elusive Star Speaks
Tom Cruise for GQ's cover story
The first trailer for Digger spent two and a half minutes on Tom Cruise's past roles before showing 42 seconds of the new film. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu of Birdman and The Revenant, it casts Cruise as an oil magnate who may unleash the end of the world. It is his first non-action, non-franchise film in years, and Cruise, now 64, calls it the most challenging character he has ever played. In a rare long interview, his first with GQ in 20 years, he turns nearly every personal question back to work, and you won’t find any mention of his religious beliefs as a high-profile member of the Church of Scientology.
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04 • 30 Minute Read
The Verge Mia Sato, Victoria Song, Hayden Field, Lauren Feiner
Can you forget how you feel about Meta?
Mark Zuckerberg for The Verge's feature on Meta
In 2021, as a whistleblower accused Facebook of harming children, Mark Zuckerberg privately told a correspondent that child safety wasn't his main focus because he was more focused on building the metaverse. Weeks later he renamed the company Meta. That bet has cost its virtual reality division more than $80 billion, though it helped Meta win about 69 percent of the smart glasses market, where harassment videos have earned its glasses the nickname "pervert glasses." Zuckerberg has since offered pay packages of up to $1 billion to build AI, yet employees describe chaotic strategy and low morale, and many use rivals' models instead. Now, for the umpteenth time, Zuckerberg hopes consumers will forgive and forget and adopt his newest project, an AI agent called Muse. Good luck, Zuck!
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The Atlantic
My Night at the Reindeer-Sausage Buffet

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