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I am in party-planning mode for my wedding this weekend, but you will not be left wanting. We have some interesting stories lined up for the rest of the week that I hope you will enjoy. Here’s today’s selection:
The "missing scientists" conspiracy that reached the White House is not a conspiracy at all, just a p-hacked panic, while actual damage to U.S. science goes unreported.
A neuroscientist reports that OpenAI's Sora didn't just generate AI video. It generated false memories, and the brain has no reliable defense against it.
The reason your wages may be lower than they should be traces back to a word coined over tea in 1930s Cambridge, and an idea economists are finally taking seriously.
The Michael Jackson biopic had to scrap footage violating a decades-old settlement, and his own daughter is publicly calling it dishonest. The estate has bigger plans.
One last thing: we have sent 148 issues of the newsletter since we launched last year. If you’ve enjoyed even a few of them, consider making your membership into the Lunch Club official by making a contribution.
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The Atlantic
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Daniel Engber
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A viral theory claiming foreign adversaries are murdering or abducting American scientists has reached the White House, House Oversight Committee, and cable news, despite having no coherent logic behind it. The people on the circulating list span four years, share no common field of expertise, and include an administrative assistant, an antigravity crank, and a chemist grieving his parents. Their deaths and disappearances have mundane explanations. Meanwhile, the actual erosion of U.S. science goes largely unremarked: mass NASA layoffs, halved NSF budgets, 40 percent of NSF staff gone.
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Longreads.com
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Tim Requarth
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OpenAI's Sora let users generate deepfake videos of themselves doing things they had never done: scaling Mount Rushmore, jet-skiing with friends. Neuroscientist Tim Requarth reports that multiple users began experiencing faint but genuine memory glitches, including spatial memories of places that don't exist and a felt sense of social connection from interactions that never happened. Drawing on decades of false memory research, he explains why the brain is structurally unable to reject vivid self-referential imagery, and what it means that a free app can now quietly rewrite who you think you are.
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The term "monopsony" was coined over afternoon tea in 1930s Cambridge, when economist Joan Robinson and a classics scholar invented a Greek-rooted word for a market with only one buyer. Economist Arindrajit Dube's new book argues the concept explains far more than a curiosity: the typical American labor market has roughly three competing employers, not the competitive free-for-all that textbooks assume. Search friction, job differentiation, and outright collusion, including a secret no-poaching pact among Apple, Google, and others, let employers suppress wages well below what competition would demand.
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The New York Times
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Mark Binelli
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The upcoming biopic "Michael" is the Jackson estate's most ambitious rehabilitation effort yet, but it had to scrap substantial footage that violated a 1994 settlement with Jackson's first accuser, pushing the film's timeline to 1988, before any allegations. Mark Binelli traces the estate's remarkable financial resurrection: from $450 million in debt at Jackson's death to over a billion earned in the following year, powered by "This Is It," Cirque du Soleil, and a Sony catalog deal worth roughly $600 million. Pending lawsuits, a silenced HBO documentary, and Jackson's own daughter's public objections complicate the carefully managed story.
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