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LUNCH BREAK READS
FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026 | Sponsored by | Morning Brew |
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Happy Friday, Lunch Club!
We have a good selection of stories on deck for today’s lunch break.
A Business Insider investigation into how American grandparents are taking on more caregiving than ever, delaying retirement, and burning through savings.
A Yale Review essay by Dan Fox on growing up with a Welsh-speaking mother, understanding nothing at his grandmother's funeral, and his slow, imperfect attempt to learn the language she was forced to abandon.
Charlize Theron tells Outside about learning to rock climb for her new Netflix thriller Apex, doing most of it herself, and why she was genuinely trying not to fall off a cliff.
Christopher Beha's new book argues that falling in love made atheism philosophically untenable. A different kind of conversion story.
Good lunch, good reads.
Brett
01
Business Insider
Noah Sheidlower
At 66, Dorenne Simonson is up at 5:30 a.m. packing lunch and doing her granddaughter's hair. She doesn't consider herself a grandmother anymore — she's the mom. Her story anchors a Business Insider examination of how American grandparents are being reshaped by caregiving demands, financial precarity, and delayed retirement. Census data shows grandparent caregivers 60 and older living without a parent present rose nearly 21% between 2009 and 2021. Many sacrifice meals and medical care. Some, researchers found, keep working specifically to avoid being drafted into full-time childcare.
02
Yale Review
Dan Fox
Dan Fox, a senior editor at The Yale Review, grew up in England with a Welsh-speaking mother and a grandmother whose entire life was spent in the hills of North Wales. At her funeral, conducted entirely in Welsh, Fox understood nothing — but felt something shift. Decades later, stranded from his aging parents during the pandemic, he downloaded Duolingo, then abandoned it when his mother found errors in seconds. The piece follows his slow, fitful effort to learn the language she was forced to suppress as a child, and what he hopes to recover by finding it.
03
Outside Magazine
Abigail Wise
For her new Netflix survival thriller Apex, Charlize Theron learned to rock climb from legendary alpinist Beth Rodden, trained for three months, and shot most of the climbing sequences herself — barefoot, on real cliffs, including one scene where she was, in her words, actually trying not to die. The film, directed by Baltasar Kormákur and co-starring Taron Egerton, follows a grieving woman hunted by a psychopath in the Australian backcountry and streams April 24. Theron calls it the best film she's ever made, in part because the remote locations demanded something closer to survival than performance.
04
The Atlantic
Luis Parrales
Christopher Beha spent years after college reading Camus, Schopenhauer, and Bertrand Russell and skipping Mass. Then he fell in love. In his new book Why I Am Not an Atheist, the novelist and former Harper's Magazine editor argues that neither scientific reductionism nor Nietzschean self-fashioning could account for what his future wife had done to him — the change was external, unearned, at someone else's mercy. That gap led him back to Catholic faith, with its medieval-mystical tradition of sitting inside uncertainty. His wife, for her part, remains an atheist.
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