Lunch Break Reads: November 3, 2025

MaryBeth Lewis, a Buffalo-area nurse, had 13 children by age 62—but she wasn't done. Unable to carry more herself and unwilling to destroy her remaining embryos or let her husband discard them, she forged his signature on surrogacy contracts, tricked a judge on Zoom, and secretly arranged for a surrogate to carry twins. When her husband discovered the deception by finding legal papers in the mail, he reported her to authorities, leading to 30 criminal charges including attempted kidnapping. A deeply reported, morally complex story about grief, obsession, reproductive technology, and a woman who couldn't stop having children even when everyone begged her to.

This MIT Technology Review essay traces conspiracy theories from their religious roots to today's AI-fueled chaos, arguing they're less about uncovering truth than adopting an apocalyptic worldview where history itself is a vast plot orchestrated by demonic forces. The piece shows how the same template—evil elites secretly controlling everything—has survived for centuries, morphing from the Illuminati to Jewish conspiracies to communists to QAnon, each version impossible to disprove because it doesn't have to make sense. What's changed is reach: social media algorithms have turned conspiracy theories from fringe beliefs into governing principles, with Trump staffing his administration with fellow believers in the paranoid style.

A wealthy Hillsdale couple hired Barbara, a 58-year-old nanny who seemed perfect—experienced, cultured, fluent in multiple languages—and let her move into their guesthouse rent-free out of compassion for her housing situation. But after firing Barbara for throwing an unauthorized pool party, the couple discovered she had a history of moving into wealthy people's homes and refusing to leave, weaponizing tenant protections to stay for months while past landlords said she owed tens of thousands and trashed properties.

This Guardian longread follows Jitu, the "chief scammer" of a remote Indian village where an entire generation abandoned farming to steal from strangers' bank accounts using nothing but mobile phones. In Jamtara, a desperately poor district where half the population lives below the poverty line, young Dalit men mastered the art of tricking people into reading out their one-time passwords, building garish mansions that tower over spartan villages and disrupting centuries-old caste hierarchies in the process.