Happy Friday, Lunch Club!

Today, we are going back in time to some of my all-time favorite stories.

Gene Weingarten's Washington Post piece on children who die in hot cars is one of the most reported and hardest-to-forget pieces of the past two decades. Gary Cartwright's Texas Monthly story from 1989 follows a meticulous young man with a gift for befriending lonely old women and a taste for arsenic. Then a Smithsonian piece on a Navy officer's Annapolis ring that passed through a Japanese hell ship and eighteen Korean winters before nearly vanishing in a pawnshop. We close with a brisk history of corporate buzzwords, which is considerably lighter but no less revealing about human nature.

I want to hear from you. What do you like about Lunch Break Reads? What do you hate? What kinds of stories are you most interested in? Drop me a line at [email protected]!

Brett

Every year, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five children in the United States die after being left in hot cars by parents who simply forgot they were there. Not negligent parents, not bad ones. Dentists, nurses, teachers, a rocket scientist. The neuroscience behind it is unsettling: under stress or disrupted routine, the brain's primitive basal ganglia can effectively overwrite the memory of a child in the backseat, leaving the conscious mind with no record that the drop-off never happened. Researcher David Diamond calls it a failure of competing memory systems. Janette Fennell, who runs a child safety nonprofit, calls it a failure of car design. What the justice system calls it varies wildly: some prosecutors charge parents with manslaughter, others decline to file anything. Gene Weingarten follows three parents through their separate encounters with identical tragedy, and the piece builds its case not with statistics alone but with the specific, unbearable details of each life destroyed. The legal and moral questions raised here have no clean answers, but the science is clear enough to challenge every assumption about the kind of parent this could happen to.

Read here, free for LBR Readers. E-mail required.

The Hill Country town of Llano, Texas had its share of eccentric fixtures, but none stranger than the Norton sisters: two elderly women who lived alone in their family's crumbling mansion, receiving almost no one except a small, high-voiced young man named Tim Scoggin. He had attached himself to the Nortons in the 1970s, driving two and a half hours at any hour to run their errands, and built a second life in San Angelo cultivating similar relationships with aging, wealthy women there. When the Norton sisters died within a day of each other in February 1988, everyone assumed it was simply time. When Olgie Nobles, one of Scoggin's San Angelo benefactors, died of sudden vomiting and organ failure five weeks later, no one connected the events. It was only when Olgie's wife Leita ended up paralyzed in a hospital that doctors found what was actually killing her: arsenic, administered in small doses over months, building a signature in her hair like tree rings. Gary Cartwright's reconstruction of the case is a gothic Texas portrait as much as a crime story, full of eccentric characters and the particular loneliness that makes old people vulnerable to anyone who pays them attention.

Read here.

In 1962, a Korean laborer at a U.S. Navy excavation site in Inchon nearly allowed a gold ring to be pawned and melted down. A Navy admiral intervened, chased it through pawnshops, and recovered it just in time to recognize the name engraved inside: Dial. The story that follows traces the ring backward through eighteen years of war, captivity, and loss. Lieutenant Minter Dial, a 1932 Annapolis graduate, commanded a fleet tug in the Philippines when Japan attacked. After Corregidor fell, he survived the Bataan Death March only because illness delayed his transfer, then spent two and a half years slowly starving at Cabanatuan prison camp. He died at thirty-three on a tennis court in Olangapo, passing the ring to a friend with instructions to deliver it to his wife. That friend, Lieutenant Douglas Fisher, survived years of captivity but lost the ring in Korea. It spent eighteen winters under a barracks floor before turning up in the mud. Gilbert King reconstructs the journey with precision and restraint, and the result is one of the finest short pieces of WWII history you're likely to find.

Read here.

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Corporate jargon didn't emerge from a vacuum. It has roots in a century's worth of competing theories about what workers actually are: machines to be optimized, social creatures to be motivated, resources to be deployed. The mechanistic language of Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management gave way in the 1930s to the softer vocabulary of human relations psychology, which held that treating people like cogs produced miserable, unproductive workers. Academia fed terms like "self-actualization" and "paradigm shift" into the corporate bloodstream. Consultants monetized the ideas, coining euphemisms for mass layoffs and wrapping efficiency drives in pseudo-scientific packaging. Wall Street added its own aggressive shorthand, borrowed from derivatives trading and business school case studies. Silicon Valley reframed everything around disruption and bandwidth. What runs through all of it is the same underlying anxiety: How do you get people to care about work that is, at bottom, indifferent to their lives? The answer has consistently been language that borrows its emotional register from religion, sports, and therapy. Everybody mocks corporate buzzwords. Everybody uses them anyway.

Read here, free for LBR Readers.