A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Secret Network of Social Media Accounts Spread the Videos

01 • 38 Minute Read

WIRED

EJ Dickson

A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work

This WIRED story is a hard read, but it's an important look at how anonymous online harassment campaigns get organized and how rarely anyone faces consequences. No surprises there. It centers on Maddie Kowalski, a University of Florida sophomore whose nonconsensual sexual videos went viral in November 2025 after an anonymous X account posted them with her name. The spread was driven by the "burnerverse," a loose network of anonymous college sports fan accounts, many tied to fraternities, that has repeatedly targeted young women by circulating explicit images or false rumors about their sex lives. Kowalski and her family were harassed for months, and she withdrew from school with PTSD while the university and police moved slowly.

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02 • 20 Minute Read

ICIJ	Scilla Alecci

Chinese banking giant serves firms linked to oligarchs and autocrats to push Beijing's agenda

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' new China Capital investigation, led by reporter Scilla Alecci, digs into 4.8 million leaked records from the London operations of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the world's largest bank and a state-owned arm of Beijing. The files show ICBC London routinely took on clients Western banks avoided, and headquarters sometimes directed deals explicitly to advance Chinese political goals. The bank opened an account for a bank co-owned by the daughters of Azerbaijan's authoritarian president and kept lending to Angola's state oil company after corruption revelations. It also made a sanctions-policy exception for Russian mining giant Nornickel, partly owned by a sanctioned Putin ally. One compliance officer even praised Nornickel's plan to relabel its products as Chinese to dodge sanctions.

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03 • 48 Minute Read

The Atlantic

George Packer

Sons and Mothers

George Packer's latest Atlantic essay is about his mother, Nancy Huddleston Packer, a legendary Stanford fiction teacher who struggled her entire life to write. After his father's suicide, she poured her attention into her son, hoping to shape him into the writer she had never become. Under that pressure he tried and failed, while his sister, who never wanted to write, became a celebrated novelist. Packer eventually fled to the Peace Corps in Togo, where he suffered a breakdown and came home early, ashamed. On the flight back, he read George Orwell's memoir Homage to Catalonia and found the plain, truthful kind of writing he could actually do. The essay is a moving, unsparing portrait of love and control.

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04 • 39 Minute Read

New York Times Magazine

Sasha Weiss

She Spent Years on a Giant Project About One Man. The Result Is Monumental.

Sasha Weiss's New York Times Magazine profile follows the artist Taryn Simon as she prepares "Father Country I Do Love You," a Guggenheim show opening Sept. 18 that fills the museum's entire rotunda with more than 1,000 photographs. The project began in 2017, when Simon found a retired FBI agent's name on an evidence receipt. Over years of conversations, she tracked down people touched by his career, from Kenyans blinded by flying glass in the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing to a police dog handler later pardoned by Trump. The result is one man's life told as an alternate history of the American security state. Running underneath is Simon's own father, a former State Department employee she never fully understood, who declined into Alzheimer's as she worked. When the agent briefly lost his memory on Election Day 2024, she found her ending. It's a great read on obsession, memory, and trying to hold a country together in pictures.

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A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Secret Network of Social Media Accounts Spread the Videos

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