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Sometimes the stories all rhyme. Today’s are about power, who has it, who gets to use it, and what happens to the people who don't.
The MIT Tech Review piece on deepfake porn is the one I keep thinking about. The Atlantic on the new masculinism is the one I'd send to anyone who thinks this is still a fringe movement. The WSJ piece will change how you think about your kid's school-issued Chromebook. And the Guardian story about Pope Leo summoning an Opus Dei investigator is the kind of plot turn you'd reject in a novel.
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MIT Technology Review
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Jessica Klein
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Jennifer ran her professional headshot through a facial recognition tool in 2023 and found one of her old porn videos with someone else's face grafted onto her body. Adult performers say their bodies are now the foundation of an AI training pipeline they never consented to. Lawyers like Corey Silverstein hear daily from actors whose work has been pirated, manipulated, or used to generate fake nudes that scam fans. The new federal Take It Down Act, intended to fight nonconsensual imagery, may instead help erase legal porn from the internet, stripping performers of income and recourse.
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Want my 15 favorite longform stories?
I put together the LBR 15, a collection of my favorite longform stories that I recommend to folks looking for a story to get lost in. I am sharing the list with any subscriber who refers one new subscriber.
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Pastor Douglas Wilson wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment and let households vote as a unit. His denomination counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson led a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. Helen Lewis traces how this kind of masculinism, once fringe, now unites the American right across pastors, podcasters, senators, and Heritage Foundation policy shops. Figures like Nick Fuentes, Scott Yenor, and Charles Cornish-Dale push agendas ranging from male-only family wages to forced-breeding camps.
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The Wall Street Journal
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Shalini Ramachandran
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Amy Warren's seventh-grade son in Wichita accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos on his school-issued device over three months, including content glorifying gun culture and sexually explicit jokes. The Wall Street Journal interviewed 45 families, administrators, and clinicians documenting how Chromebooks and iPads have turned American classrooms into infinite-scroll machines. Internal Google documents from 2019 acknowledged the school YouTube experience was "broken." Neuroscience research links heavy screen use to weaker attention, lower white matter organization, and worse reading outcomes.
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Financial journalist Gareth Gore spent five years investigating Opus Dei after stumbling onto the group while reporting on the 2017 collapse of Spain's Banco Popular. His 2024 book accuses the Catholic organization of human trafficking, child grooming, drugging members with Rohypnol, and engineering political influence inside the MAGA movement through figures like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo. Opus Dei denies the allegations. In March, Pope Leo summoned Gore to the Vatican for a one-on-one audience and ordered cameras into the room so the meeting would be public. Gore read it as a signal that the new pope wants reform.
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