LUNCH BREAK READS

A Russian lieutenant fed Ukraine the coordinates that killed more than 300 of his fellow soldiers, then crossed a minefield at night to switch sides.
Glenn Walker stopped paying the mob for the right to sell Christmas trees in the Bronx, and the mob noticed.
Federal prosecutors say three egg giants rigged the benchmark behind supermarket prices while economists blamed bird flu.
Jonathan Gluck spent 22 years refusing to call himself a cancer patient, until a Montana fly-fishing retreat with 10 other men changed that.

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01 • 30 Minute Read

The Wall Street Journal

Matthew Luxmoore

The Defector

On a frozen field in Ukraine in February 2024, Russian Lt. Lev Stupnikov faked a stomachache and ducked into the trees moments before Ukrainian missiles struck troops whose location he had leaked, killing 68. A signals officer disillusioned by army corruption and an invasion he considered evil, he had begun spying after his mother, an anti-Putin office worker in Siberia, sought help for his desertion from Dmytro Karpenko, a programmer who runs Russian informants for Ukrainian military intelligence. Over five months, Stupnikov fed Kyiv radio frequencies, battle plans, and coordinates that killed more than 300 Russians, and one mistaken pin nearly killed him. As his commander grew suspicious, he crossed a minefield at night to Ukrainian lines. His mother and sister later fled, but his wife refused to follow. He now fights his old brigade in a Ukrainian army unit of anti-Putin Russians, insisting Putin, not he, betrayed his oath.

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02 • 35 Minute Read

The Foundry

Clara Preve

The Man Who Wouldn't Pay

On November 2, 1994, Glenn Walker was on the phone with his wife from his Bronx office when two men burst in and he said, “This is it.” Then she heard a gunshot. A Florida farmer who trucked produce to New York’s Hunts Point market and sold Christmas trees on a Bronx lot, Walker had refused to keep paying mob collectors, defying a tribute system tree vendors had accepted since the 1930s. His tires were slashed and his lot firebombed, but he reopened, went on TV, and drew record crowds, embarrassing the men he had defied. A hired accomplice was convicted after another vendor produced a receipt the man had signed for a later extortion payment, but whoever ordered the killing was never charged.

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03 • 20 Minute Read

Politico

Marcia Brown and Steve Volk

Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All

In October 2022, as soaring egg prices finally began to fall, an executive at Cal-Maine, a Mississippi egg giant, texted rival Hickman’s Egg Ranch, “Let’s hold it today.” Federal prosecutors allege the two companies, later joined by Iowa-based Versova, then flooded a wholesale egg exchange with bids they never meant to complete, inflating the benchmark that sets supermarket prices. Most economists and news outlets blamed bird flu and dismissed collusion talk as conspiracy thinking, though antimonopoly advocates like Angela Huffman of Farm Action argued flock losses were too small to explain a 138% jump. This June, the Justice Department and 17 states proposed a settlement with a roughly $3 million fine, five years of monitoring, and 53 million donated eggs, with no admission of wrongdoing.

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04 • 20 Minute Read

The New York Times

Jonathan Gluck

I Never Saw Myself as a ‘Cancer Patient’ — Until I Went Fishing With 10 of Them

Fly fishing with cancer patients in Montana

Jonathan Gluck has lived with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer, for 22 years but long refused to think of himself as a cancer patient. Fly fishing was his escape, and an early support group had scared him, so he avoided Reel Recovery, a nonprofit offering free fishing retreats for men with cancer. A 2023 relapse changed that, forcing him into CAR T-cell therapy, a grueling immunotherapy that left him anxious, depressed, and unable to compartmentalize. This spring he joined 10 men at a Montana ranch, whose stories of failing bodies and dwindling options unsettled him even as they bonded the group quickly. Rex, a 74-year-old veteran with terminal prostate cancer, talked calmly about learning to die well, then caught the day’s biggest trout. Gluck writes that being among people who already understood lifted part of a weight he had carried for decades.

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He faked a stomachache. Then 68 Russian soldiers died.

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