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LUNCH BREAK READS

Happy Monday!

Four reads to elevate your lunch break today:

  • Scott Pelley on getting fired from 60 Minutes, and what he says Bari Weiss asked him to change in a story about a police killing.

  • The centuries-long obsession with measuring Earth's exact shape, and why the gaps in the numbers kept paying off.

  • A West Texas father and his two sons chasing one last hot-air balloon title together before Dad retires.

  • The 1960s worms that "learned," and could supposedly pass their memories by being eaten, and why they have gone completely dumb.

Brett

01 • 22 Minute Read
New York Times Lulu Garcia-Navarro
The Interview: Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at ‘60 Minutes’
Bari Weiss took over CBS News and fired most of 60 Minutes' senior staff in one day, including executive producer Tanya Simon and a third of the correspondents. The cuts came after a season when the broadcast's audience grew nine percent. Scott Pelley spoke up at a staff meeting, then got fired himself once Tom Cibrowski falsely accused him of assaulting the new producer. Pelley alleges Weiss pressed his team to describe a police shooting the way the president had, against what the video showed. He refused. His firing email arrived after colleagues held a four-hour vigil outside his office.
Unlocked for LBR Readers →
02 • 13 Minute Read
Aeon Miguel Ohnesorge
What shape is the Earth?
In 1852 the Swedish astronomer Nils Selander finished a 40-year survey of an arc stretching from the Black Sea to the Arctic Sea, splitting it into 258 triangles to pin down exactly how much Earth flattens at its poles. Newton was the reason. His 1687 gravitation law predicted a specific bulge. Measurements roughly backed him but missed his number, and explaining that gap forced Laplace to deduce that Earth's density rises toward its core. Later mismatches between predictions and data produced isostasy, then plate tectonics. Miguel Ohnesorge argues measurement matters because it keeps teaching us where our ideas fall short.
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03 • 24 Minute Read
Texas Monthly Katy Vine and Meher Yeda
The Rise and Rise of Balloon Racing’s First Family
Joe Heartsill, 75, has won the 1995 World Hot Air Balloon Championship and five U.S. national titles, and his sons Rhett and Lucas have collected their own. The three San Angelo men form ballooning's first family, a sport scored on accuracy rather than speed, where pilots steer only by rising and dropping into different wind currents. At the 2025 U.S. nationals in Longview, Joe wanted all three to qualify together for September's world championship in Krosno, Poland, before he retires. Weather wrecked the final day. Officials counted two tasks: Rhett made the team, Lucas became an alternate, Joe placed third.
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04 • 14 Minute Read
Quanta Magazine Claire L. Evans
Are Memories Transferable — or Edible?
In the 1960s James McConnell convinced scientists that flatworms could be trained and that their memories passed to other worms through cannibalism, a claim roughly 36 labs reproduced and science fairs adopted. Then it collapsed. Six decades later, Harvard's Sam Gershman set out to settle the question, sending an assistant to hammer through Charles River ice and wade Michigan lakes for wild planarians. None of twelve strains would learn anything. Meanwhile memory transfer works in sea slugs and roundworms, where injected or eaten genetic material carries a trained response. McConnell, Gershman now suspects, simply bet on the wrong worm.
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