This website uses cookies

Read our Privacy policy and Terms of use for more information.

LUNCH BREAK READS

Hope you are having a great start to the week. Here are today’s four stories to get you through your lunch break.

Join the Lunch Club

📣 Subscriber Shoutout: Thank you to Steve P. in Salt Lake City for supporting LBR this week!

This newsletter stays free. Lunch Club members get the Weekly Top 5 (a ranked Saturday roundup), Reading Lists of Brett's all-time favorites, monthly Source Notes from Brett, the full LBR Archive, and ad-free reading, starting at $5/mo.

Join the Lunch Club →
01 • 18 Minute Read
The Walrus Jessica Leeder
The Impossible Case of Lilly and Jack: How Did Two Kids Just Vanish in Nova Scotia?
A grandmother holding photos of Lilly and Jack Sullivan
Six-year-old Lilly Sullivan and her four-year-old brother Jack vanished from a remote Nova Scotia property on a May morning in 2025, and no trace of them ever surfaced. Jessica Leeder spent months in Lansdowne Station, where RCMP officers, drones, and cadaver dogs turned up nothing but a torn blanket and a single boot print. Stepfather Daniel Martell insisted someone took the kids. Online, strangers insisted he did. He was later charged with sexual assault, assault, and forcible confinement in an unrelated case. Police said no one was a suspect. Eighteen months later, Lilly and Jack were still gone.
Read the Story →
02 • 45 Minute Read
The New Yorker Joshua Yaffa
Inside Russia's New Gulag
Liliia Prutian, a Ukrainian medic held in Russian detention
Liliia Prutian was raped on the battlefield before she disappeared into Russia's prison system for more than two years. Joshua Yaffa spent months tracing the women who shared her Rostov jail cell: an English teacher accused of harboring a soldier, a vendor with Parkinson's shuttled between twenty facilities, a mother sentenced to eighteen years for describing being electrocuted and mutilated in a factory turned torture site. More than nine thousand soldiers had come home in prisoner swaps. Fewer than five hundred civilians had. Advocates were racing to include women like her in a peace deal before it was too late.
Read the Story →

03 • 28 Minute Read
The Atlantic Sally Jenkins
The Man Who Refused to Sit on the Sidelines
Kevin Dowdell with his sons Patrick and James
Kevin Dowdell taught his sons never to sit on the sidelines, then vanished into the South Tower on September 11, 2001, leaving nothing behind but a Halligan bar marked with his initials. Sally Jenkins traced what his sons Patrick and James did next: they suited up and spent seven months digging through Ground Zero rubble, searching for their father and recovering strangers instead. Patrick went on to West Point and Iraq. James joined the FDNY and took his father's badge number. Twenty-five years later, Kevin was still missing, and his chair at the family table still got a glass.
Unlocked for LBR Readers →
04 • 14 Minute Read
Longreads Hannah Engler Harvey
You and Me and QVC
A television, remote, and credit card
Hannah Engler Harvey and her friend Lizzie built their friendship around a television that never turned off. QVC had run twenty-four hours a day since 1986, and Harvey spent the pandemic and years after watching it with Lizzie on a pink Drew Barrymore sectional, memorizing hosts' color-name feuds and shopping vocabulary like 'beefy' fabric. The channel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2026 while its CEO's pay rose 70 percent. Harvey and Lizzie no longer lived together, and QVC couldn't fill the silence when she moved out. What survived wasn't the shopping. It was the voice on the line.
Read the Story →
Further Reading
Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe
Your Dog Really Can Tell When You're Happy
The Most Powerful Men in America Are Eating Only Steak and Sauerkraut. Could I?
Now, Thanks to Sam Altman, You Never Have to Speak With Your Kids Again

Keep Reading

© 2026 Lunch Break Reads.
beehiivPowered by beehiiv