Lunch Break Reads: October 17, 2025

It was dark and wet and dangerous in Zanesville, Ohio. Terry Thompson had let his scores of big animals out of their hard, grim cages, then shot himself in the head. The tigers and bears were loose. Night was falling. Everything was out of control.

This is one of those stories that starts as Cold War espionage and ends as environmental mystery. The Secret of Nanda Devi unpacks how a CIA mission to spy on China in the 1960s led to a nuclear device being lost somewhere in the Himalayas and possibly still buried beneath the ice today. It’s part adventure tale, part cautionary fable about hubris and the hidden costs of secrecy.

Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains

For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest.