Lunch Break Reads: October 27, 2025

In this heartfelt and often hilarious travel essay, a father takes his 8-year-old son on a Theodore Roosevelt–themed road trip through the Badlands, hoping to teach him resilience and “the strenuous life.” What begins with tornadoes, bad motels, and gas-soaked clothes turns into a journey of discovery.

Joy Williams’s piece from Harper’s is a haunting, literary account of Gene Hackman’s final days, not a traditional obituary but a meditation on mortality, isolation, and devotion. It recounts how Hackman, 94, and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, died alone in their Santa Fe home, she from the rare hantavirus and he days later, likely from heart failure compounded by Alzheimer’s. Their dog Zinna also perished, trapped in a crate. Writer Joy Williams moves between forensic detail and philosophical rumination, contrasting Hackman’s cinematic deaths with the slow, bewildering reality of his own.

This devastating investigation takes you inside the Blade, a 50-block stretch in South Central LA that's become one of America's worst sex-trafficking corridors, through the eyes of Ana (first put on the street at 13) and the lone officer trying to save girls like her. The reporting is unflinching but deeply humane, showing how traffickers make $12,000 a night while a massively understaffed police unit struggles to intervene, and how one former victim turned advocate becomes the only lifeline for girls failed by every system.

This deeply personal essay traces a complicated father-son relationship through the lens of running. The author's father was a brilliant academic destined for greatness who instead spiraled into alcoholism, a closeted life, HIV, and chaos abroad, with running as his one constant until he stopped. The son spent his life both wanting to be like his father and desperately afraid of falling apart at 40 like he did, so he kept running harder, eventually setting age-group records and running ultras.

Caitrin Keiper’s essay will completely change how you think about elephants—it's part science, part philosophy, and part love letter to these incredible beings who mourn their dead, pass down cultural knowledge, and possess something that can only be called a soul. The writing is gorgeous and moves seamlessly from explaining how a baby elephant learns to use its trunk to exploring what consciousness really means, culminating in an almost unbearably moving scene of the last elephant in a forest trying to communicate with a blue whale across the ocean.