Four interesting reads to beat the doomscroll during today's lunch break.
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THE TELEGRAPH
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Max Stephens
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Sonia Exelby booked a return flight home for the Monday after she landed in Florida. She never intended to use it. Max Stephens reconstructs the two years that led a 31 year old from a quiet English seaside town to a stranger's Airbnb, where she had arranged to pay him $4,000 to kill her. Her sisters had already called police once to stop her flying to America. This time nobody knew she had gone. The messages she sent from inside that cottage are almost too much to read.
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THE ATLANTIC
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Connie Chang
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Peter Galassi's 9 year old secretly opened accounts on his mother's phone, chasing better odds at hatching a rare pet. Connie Chang found that many of Roblox's most popular titles run on the same variable reward loops as slot machines, and nearly 60 percent of top grossing mobile games now include loot boxes. Researchers say children's brains, still building the circuitry that curbs impulsive behavior, may be especially exposed to that conditioning. Roblox says only 1.4 percent of its users pay to play. One father put it plainly: it felt like watching his son get hooked on meth.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
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Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
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Soldiers on motorbikes led the raid that found $1.6 million in fake $50 bills stacked inside a Colombian cannabis farm guarded by rebels and cartel gunmen. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee traces the months long hunt for the man behind those notes, a graphic designer who gave his counterfeits sequential serial numbers, a detail most forgers never bother faking. He went by Ysraeli. He told investigators he only wanted to design one perfect bill. The court did not see it that way.
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OUTSIDE
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Bryan Schatz and Pat Hutchison
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Bryan Schatz and Pat Hutchison quit steady jobs in San Francisco and Seattle to build a cabin in Washington's Cascades for what they guessed would run $20,000. Nine months behind schedule and $30,000 over budget, they wired a beam into place with a Subaru, a hermit with a chainsaw wandered into the middle of the build, and Schatz once hurled a two by four into the woods rather than admit he cut it wrong. They sold the finished cabin for $115,000 and are already plotting the next one. Some lessons apparently need a second cabin to learn.
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