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01 • 30 Minute Read

The New York Times Magazine

Susan Dominus

Someone Was Impersonating Her in Online Affairs. She Says It Was Her Husband.

Portrait of German actress Collien Fernandes

German actress Collien Fernandes was impersonated online for years. Someone posed as her to start sexual affairs with men she knew, sent them nude photographs, and spread fake porn of her. She couldn't find who was behind it and even made a documentary trying to. Then at Christmas 2024, her husband of 14 years, German comedian Christian Ulmen, confessed to the abuse, which he’d perpetrated for a decade. She filed criminal charges in Spain and went public, sparking a #MeToo-scale reckoning in Germany over digital abuse.

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02 • 30 Minute Read

ProPublica

Molly Hensley-Clancy

This Coach Is Banned From Working With Kids. Why Is He Still Coaching?

Volleyball coach Ryan Richardson at a park in Pharr, Texas

Ryan Richardson, a Texas volleyball coach, received a lifetime ban on coaching children after an oversight body found he'd had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old player, groomed and abused others, and kept a bed in a back room of his gym. But, he never stopped. He handed his club, Elite Sports Performance in Pharr, Texas, to an employee on paper, then kept running practices, going to tournaments, and posting daily videos of himself with teenage girls.

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03 • 20 Minute Read

The Guardian

Jill Lepore

Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored

Jill Lepore, a Harvard Professor of American History and New Yorker staff writer, has a new book out tomorrow that I am looking forward to picking up. The Guardian has excerpted The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, looking at the history of technological innovation that leads us to the current AI-panic we are experiencing. She traces decades of thinkers who warned computers might replace democratic debate with prediction-by-algorithm, and the dreamers who swore the internet would make everyone free and equal. The dreamers won, especially Silicon Valley's Ayn Rand-worshipping libertarians. By 1996 the internet was basically unregulated, and the warnings got ignored the whole way down.

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04 • 14 Minute Read

Aeon	Sarah Berg

The fog of hunger

Archival photograph accompanying Sarah Berg's essay on hunger

Sarah Berg, an Arkansan OB-GYN, writes about how girls learn from a young age to eat less, and the real toll it takes on their development. Berg started restricting food at 11, before middle school, and describes her hunger not as an occasional feeling but as constant background noise that ate up her mental bandwidth. She points to research showing women who diet actually think worse on hard tasks, and that the culture rewards thinness (adults calling her starved body a "new figure," a surgeon praising her for "keeping her figure up") while ignoring issues like bone density. Her point: a well-fed woman is harder to dismiss.

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Someone impersonated her online for a decade. It was her husband.

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