Lunch Break Reads: October 10, 2025

Mark Dent tells the story of Sarah Ray, a Texas woman who has spent two decades helping others seek compensation for cancer and other illnesses likely contracted at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ has built a delirious new culture of consumption — and trapped users in a vortex of debt.

A heartbreaking and beautifully written story about the quiet damage of secrecy and the weight of family truth. Through careful reporting and compassion, the writer reveals how one hidden past shaped generations and how uncovering it became both painful and freeing.

Violence has marred the American constitutional order since the founding. Is it inevitable?

One of the most haunting true stories I’ve ever read. It follows a family of tourists who disappeared in Death Valley in 1996 and the obsessive searcher who refused to stop looking for them. Tom Mahood turns what could have been a simple mystery into a meditation on obsession, isolation, and the unforgiving beauty of the desert.