LUNCH BREAK READS

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Happy Tuesday.

Today we open in Philadelphia, 1876, where America threw itself a 100th birthday party while quietly walking away from Reconstruction. It's a great read from The Atlantic.

The rest of today's stories: a fight over whether moving orangutans away from palm oil plantations is actually killing them, an argument that Gen Z's malaise has a near-perfect twin in 1830s Paris, and a Georgia man who thought he'd hit a deer and learned from the noon news he'd killed a ten-year-old girl.

Brett

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01 • ~15 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Jake Lundberg

A Perfect Gilded Age Confection

When Philadelphia hosted America's centennial fair in 1876, nearly 20 percent of the country streamed through to see a 122,000-pound steam engine, the first telephone, and a "Restaurant of the South" where Black waitstaff played enslaved plantation workers. Fergus M. Bordewich's new book uses the fair as a lens on a republic turning its back on Reconstruction. While crowds gasped at machinery, the Hamburg Massacre unfolded in South Carolina, Custer fell at Little Bighorn, and a disputed presidential election nearly broke the country.

🔓 Unlocked for LBR Readers →

02 • ~20 Minute Read

The Guardian

Sally Williams

‘Should we leave them to die?’ The battle over how to save orangutans from the curse of palm oil

Indonesia produces 59 percent of the world's palm oil, and the plantations have swallowed orangutan habitat across Borneo. Conservationists tranquilize the displaced apes and move them deeper into the forest, framing each capture as a rescue. A new study calls the practice harmful: relocated orangutans get attacked by rivals, starve in unfamiliar territory, or trek back to ruined home ranges. The charity Yiari defends the work, citing farmers who shoot first. Meanwhile, transmigrant settlers from Java earn life-changing money from oil palms while orangutan mothers die from spear wounds.

Read the Story →

03 • ~16 Minute Read

Aeon	Emily Herring

Gen Z but two centuries ago

Le mal du siècle, the sickness of the age, gripped a generation of young French Romantics in the 1830s. They had come of age after Napoleon's fall, raised on stories of glory but handed a small, bourgeois world that could not contain their ambitions. They drifted into cynicism, libertinage, and self-pity. Emily Herring argues the parallels to Gen Z are hard to miss: a foreclosed future, real-time horror piped through screens without lived experience to anchor it, doomerism as posture. Her prescription, drawn from the era, is to treat anxiety as a signal about an unjust system rather than a personal failing.

Read the Story →

04 • ~18 Minute Read

The Sunday Long Read

Joshua St. Clair

What do you do after you accidentally kill a child?

Ryan Nickerson was driving to work in July 2017 when a 10-year-old girl named Kennadē Patterson darted across a dark Georgia highway. He thought he had hit a deer. He learned otherwise watching the noon news, holding his 35-day-old daughter. He was never charged. What followed was eight months of drinking, an attempt to end his life, and a Facebook message to Kennadē's mother. Her reply, three months later, refused to blame him. Five years on, Ryan teaches fourth graders. He still drives the dented blue Nissan.

Read the story →

He thought he hit a deer. He'd killed a 10-year-old.

LUNCH BREAK READS

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

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