Today’s lineup moves from boardrooms to backcountry. We start in Philadelphia with a gripping account of how a leadership clash at the city’s art museum spiraled into lawsuits and chaos. Then it’s off to the Great Smoky Mountains, where an elite rescue team is filling dangerous gaps as public resources shrink. You’ll also find a sharp profile of Adam Tooze, the go-to thinker for understanding global crises, and a refreshingly candid conversation with Jodie Foster on why she walked away from the studio system.

Happy Reading,

Brett

Sasha Suda, the 45-year-old director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum, was summoned to a meeting in October 2024 and given a choice: resign amicably or be fired. She'd just returned from securing a $25 million donation and hosting international museum directors. The board claimed she'd given herself unauthorized raises totaling $39,000 over two years. She was fired the following week.

Suda had arrived in 2022 as a rising star hired to modernize the institution after her predecessor's tenure ended badly. She reduced the museum's deficit by two-thirds, brought in major donations, increased school visits fivefold, and mounted critically acclaimed exhibitions. But she clashed with former board chair Leslie Anne Miller, who Suda says kept her isolated from the larger board and intruded constantly into her work.

Documents show the cost-of-living raises were processed through payroll, approved by finance, and published in tax forms the board reviewed. Suda's lawsuit alleges a "corrupt faction" fired her for doing her job. The museum hired Daniel Weiss, a 68-year-old establishment figure, to replace her. One board member resigned in protest and withdrew her substantial donation.

America's busiest national park isn't Yellowstone or Yosemite but the Great Smoky Mountains, which logs over twelve million visits annually across terrain choked with rhododendron where hikers routinely get lost, injured, or dead. A fifteen-year-old fell five hundred feet jumping between rocks. Lightning welded a man to the ground for ten seconds. Backpackers burned their clothes trying to build fires.

Andrew Herrington, a former park ranger turned wilderness educator, created BUSAR in 2015 after realizing park rangers desperately needed backup for the gnarliest rescues. His team of nineteen elite volunteers passes brutal fitness tests, trains constantly on technical rope systems, and deploys in blizzards at midnight for strangers. Most take no pay. They rescued a fourteen-year-old who fell at a waterfall and broke her femur. They saved a man who fell forty feet onto a log and spent three hours in frigid water.

Meanwhile, the Park Service lost twenty-four percent of its staff in 2025, facing a twenty-three-billion-dollar maintenance backlog. BUSAR fills the gap because federal funding can't keep pace with popularity. When a diabetic hiker needed rescue during Hurricane Helene, the thirty-six-hour mission required dozens of people slogging through trails turned to rivers.

Historian Adam Tooze confronted Biden administration officials in Brussels, declaring flatly they had "failed in their absolutely central mission" to prevent Trump's return. He stunned former trade representative Katherine Tai by arguing these liberal elites were self-satisfied schmucks enacting sentimental morality tales while losing catastrophically. If this were the 1930s, he told me later, "I would have taken you out and shot you."

Tooze rose to prominence with "Crashed," his 2008 financial crisis history that became Chuck Schumer's policy playbook and landed him White House invitations. But he grew disgusted by what he calls the Biden team's narcissism, particularly their refusal to acknowledge that their China policy was accelerating, not preventing, the liberal world order's collapse.

Now Tooze's consuming obsession is China's unprecedented rise. He's learning Mandarin, traveling to Tianjin for conferences, and arguing that China matters vastly more to climate change than anything happening in America.

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Jodie Foster still thinks about Clarice Starling. She turned down the 2001 sequel "Hannibal" because the novel was grotesque nonsense where the cannibal feeds Clarice a victim's brain and they become romantic partners. But she wonders what Clarice would be like at 63, after forty years in the FBI. Would she have adopted the institution's judgy toughness or become the person who changed it?

Foster's 2013 Golden Globes speech confused everyone. She thanked her "ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister" Cydney Bernard, and people thought she was coming out. "They were confused!" she says now. She'd written something artful and elusive, deliberately literary so it couldn't be chopped up and misinterpreted. More importantly, she announced she was stepping back from big studio movies. Few people understood that part either.

She followed through. Foster directed TV episodes and acted in two little-seen films over ten years. She'd quit acting after turning fifty because she'd asked someone for a cappuccino and realized she was becoming a Hollywood asshole. Her mother Brandy, who managed her career from childhood, had pushed her toward respected work rather than money or objectification. Brandy died in 2019 after moving to Paris for ten years without speaking French, finally becoming the person she always wanted to be.

The internet gives you everything and helps you understand nothing. The Lunch Break Reads Weekend Edition solves that problem. Every week we pick one theme that actually matters and build you a curated reading list that goes deep instead of wide. Underground book markets. Deep-sea mining's geopolitical consequences. The kind of stuff that makes you dangerous at dinner parties.