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LUNCH BREAK READS

Thursday, May 21, 2026

The weekend is in sight!

But first:

  • A century of machines trying to write like humans, from Auto-Beatnik to ChatGPT.

  • Brighter streetlights cut crime 35 percent. No arrests required.

  • The daughter of Canada's Rolex Killer on what true crime takes from victims' families.

  • An Italian novelist hides his synths and hands his apartment to strangers, three times a year, just to keep traveling.

Got a suggestion for the newsletter? Hit reply and let me know!

Brett

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01 • ~18 Minute Read
The New Yorker Jill Lepore
The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
Long before ChatGPT flooded inboxes with synthetic prose, programmers were already trying to teach machines to write. In 1962, a California engineer fed a vacuum-tube computer 3,500 words and 128 sentence patterns and dubbed the result Auto-Beatnik. It produced lines like "Broccoli is often blind." Jill Lepore traces a century of similar schemes: Cold War cryptographers, Christopher Strachey's 1953 love-letter generator, Roald Dahl's prophetic Great Automatic Grammatizator, and the 1931 Plot Robot that turned out to be cardboard. By 2024, machines wrote roughly half of English articles online. The Great Molasses Flood, Lepore suggests, has a sequel.
Read the Story→
02 • ~9 Minute Read
The Atlantic Elizabeth Glazer
A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime
Brighter streetlights cut serious nighttime crime in New York public housing by 35 percent without a single extra arrest, according to a randomized trial by Penn criminologist Aaron Chalfin. Elizabeth Glazer, who advised Bill de Blasio on criminal justice, lays out how a $210 million lighting program in 2014 became a quiet rebuke to broken-windows policing. Greening vacant lots in Philadelphia tracked with a 29 percent drop in gun violence. Fixing derelict buildings: 39 percent. The lesson Kelling and Wilson actually wrote down in 1982 was about repairing physical disorder. Police departments heard something else and arrested 230,000 people a year.
Unlocked for LBR Readers →
03 • ~21 Minute Read
Toronto Life Heather Jane
My Life as a True Crime Spectacle
Heather Jane's father is Albert Walker, the Rolex Killer: a financial adviser who embezzled $3.2 million, fled to the UK with her teenage sister Sheena, and murdered a man named Ronald Platt to steal his identity. Walker became the fourth most wanted person on Interpol's list before a serial number on Platt's watch gave him away. When CBC's Sea of Lies podcast aired in 2025, no producer contacted the family. Heather Jane listened in one sitting and vomited for three days afterward. She had spent twenty years in therapy. The genre, she argues, has rules about consent it refuses to follow.
Read the Story →
04 • ~16 Minute Read
The Dial Francesco Pacifico
Strangers Rent My Home, Sleep in My Bed, Play My Guitar
Italian novelist Francesco Pacifico hid his synthesizers behind sweaters, covered the bloodstained mattress, and handed his Rome apartment to strangers for five nights. No money changed hands. The home-swap platform claims 250,000 members in 155 countries and a community built on trust. Pacifico calls it something else: middle-class people in stagnant economies pawning their intimacy to keep traveling. Italian wages have not moved in a decade. His coffee went from 14 euros a kilo to 22 in three years. One guest left an LP and a handwritten note. Most just left misplaced objects and a five-star review.
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