a day ago
Sitdown Sunday: 'How many?' The mysterious heist of 280,000 eggs from the US's biggest producer
IT'S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We've hand-picked some of the week's best reads for you to savour.
1. The great egg heist
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
280,000 stolen eggs worth $100,000. A ransom note. A company founded by a farmer nicknamed 'The Big Chicken'. These are some of the components of this cracking investigation, accompanied by egg-celent illustrations.
(
The Washington Post
, approx 16 mins reading time)
The staff began explaining what happened. 'That many eggs?' the deputy said. 'Holy shit.' They showed him internal invoices that valued the stolen loot at $36,621, or roughly $1.57 per dozen — a fraction of what consumers would have paid at the store. The deputy asked for the name of the victim in the case. Previously, the egg farm had been owned by ISE America. But in 2024, Cal-Maine had paid about $110 million for around 4,000 acres and 4.7 million chickens, expanding its empire along the East Coast. It was one of more than two dozen companies Cal-Maine had acquired since it was founded in 1957 by a 6-foot-4-inch Mississippi farmer named Fred Adams Jr. He was known to many as 'The Big Chicken.'
'If we had a Mount Rushmore,' the head of United Egg Producers once said, 'Mr. Adams would most definitely be our George Washington.' The Big Chicken's big strategy was to own almost every step of the process: the hen breeding, the chick hatching, the pullet growing, the feed milling, the egg processing, the carton packaging, the wholesale distributing. After he died in 2020, Adams's four daughters maintained majority control of the publicly traded company, which churns out more than 8 million eggs an hour — a dozen for just about every person in Boston — and sells more than 13 billion a year.
2. Crimes of the century
Israel and the US continue to deny that the former is committing genocide in Gaza, but there is insurmountable evidence that they have committed potentially thousands of war crimes. Suzy Hansen details it thoroughly in this well-written piece.
(
Intelligencer
, approx 50 mins reading time)
Even the most hardened cynic may ask, What system could possibly have allowed this? Unlike the Holocaust, whose horrors were properly understood by the outside world only after the fact, the evidence of Gaza's horrors is immediately known and ubiquitous thanks to smartphones, despite the lack of on-the-ground reporting from western journalists barred from the Strip. The postwar legal order established to prevent the atrocities of World War II has failed, and worse, the U.S., which nominally took on the responsibility of preserving that order, is abetting the killing and abandoning any pretense of adhering to the law. 'It's not that huge numbers of potential incidents of war crimes don't happen in places like Ukraine or Congo,' Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, told me, and he could have added Sudan or China. 'What has brought a lot of attention to Gaza is that it's a very sophisticated military backed by the United States, which is essentially bombing and starving at will. The outrage is about the relentless and very one-sided nature of the conflict.'
3. Jaws
Roy Scheider and the eponymous shark in a still from Jaws (1975).
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Friday marked 50 years since the release of the iconic film, and with it the scariest two musical notes in cinema history. Five filmmakers discuss why it remains a classic.
(
The Ringer
, approx 8 mins reading time)
Jon Turteltaub still remembers the first time he saw Jaws. The director of National Treasure, Cool Runnings, and The Meg was 12 years old when the 1975 blockbuster came out. Back then, the summer was an unceremonious burial ground for lousy movies. So Turteltaub walked into the theater halfway through a screening and sat down. He wound up watching Jaws through to the end and then sticking around to see the entire thing from start to finish. He was glued to his seat, with one exception. 'Right after the shark popped up in the chumming sequence with Chief Brody [Roy Scheider], I went to the lobby to use the pay phone. I called my mother and told her I thought I was having a heart attack,' Turteltaub says. 'I was serious. I was also an idiot. But I was completely overwhelmed by the entire experience.'
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4. The end of reading?
Nowadays, reading a physical book seems anachronistic for some. The shift from page to screen has taken decades. With literacy rates dropping and the rise of AI, how will we read in the future? Joshua Rothman asks the question in this thought-provoking piece.
(
The New Yorker
, approx 13 mins reading time)
In our current reading regime, summarized or altered texts are the exception, not the rule. But over the next decade or so, that polarity may well reverse: we may routinely start with alternative texts and only later decide to seek out originals, in roughly the same way that we now download samples of new books to our Kindles before committing to them. Because A.I. can generate abridgments, summaries, and other condensed editions on demand, we may even switch between versions as circumstances dictate—the way that, today, you might decide to listen to a podcast at '2x' speed, or quit a boring TV show and turn to Wikipedia to find out how it ended. Pop songs often come in different edits—the clean edit, and various E.D.M. remixes. As a writer, I may not want to see my text refracted in this way. But the power of refraction won't be mine to control; it will lay with readers and their A.I.s. Together, they will collapse the space between reading and editing.
5. Labubu dolls
Labubu toys in a store in Shanghai.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Have you heard of these weird little toys? They've gone viral, with some countries having to pause sales due to demand. Why is everyone going mad over them, and are they a symbol of Chinese soft power?
(
BBC
, approx 6 mins reading time)
Before the world discovered Labubu, their fame was limited to China. They started to become a hit just as the country emerged from the pandemic in late 2022, according to Ashley Dudarenok, founder of China-focused research firm ChoZan. 'Post-pandemic, a lot of people in China felt that they wanted to emotionally escape… and Labubu was a very charming but chaotic character,' she says. 'It embodied that anti-perfectionism.' The Chinese internet, which is huge and competitive, produces plenty of viral trends that don't go global. But this one did and its popularity quickly spread to neighbouring South East Asia. Fiona, who lives in Canada, says she first heard about Labubu from Filipino friends in 2023. That's when she started buying them – she says she finds them cute, but their increasing popularity is a major draw: 'The more popular it gets the more I want it.'
6. Poison in the water
A small Swedish town discovered their drinking water contained extremely high levels of synthetic chemicals. It turned out to be the worst known case – but the residents were left to figure out what it meant for themselves.
(
The Guardian
, approx 22 mins reading time)
To many in Ronneby, including municipality staff, forever chemicals were still largely a mystery. 'In December 2013, Pfas was completely unknown to us,' said Roger Fredriksson, who was mayor at the time. Ninnie Wikström, a green tech entrepreneur now in her early 40s who has lived in the area on and off since she was a child, was not unduly worried by the announcement. 'Nobody knew what it was and how dangerous it was,' she recalled. Herman Afzelius, Wikström's ex-husband, an IT business manager with startling blue eyes who moved to Kallinge in 2002, also saw no great cause for alarm: yes, there had been something in the water, but now it was fine. He got on with his life. It was almost Christmas, after all.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Women cyclists in the early 1900s.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
How the invention of the bicycle revolutionised freedom for women.
(
Bicycling
, approx 8 mins reading time)
As bikes began to crowd the streets of America, they transformed women's lives. Women now had an accessible option for independent travel, but also, as anyone who's ever ridden a bike can confirm, riding bikes changes the way you see yourself in the world. It gives you power. Once they got on bicycles, women traveled farther and started to dress more practically; they were literally moving forward completely under their own power. A girl on a bike in the 1800s was a giant middle finger to people everywhere who were telling women what they couldn't do. In 1894, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky became the first woman to ride a bicycle around the world, simply because a man made a bet that it couldn't be done.
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