She caught him with another woman. Then she exposed him as a Russian spy.

01 • 25 Minute Read

The Guardian

Shaun Walker

A bungled bomb plot in Poland exposed a spy – but whose spy was he?

Polish bomb plot and Russian spy story image

While studying veterinary medicine in the Russian city of Saransk, Igor Rogov was recruited as an informant by an officer of the FSB, Russia's security service, he later told investigators. He went on to campaign for opposition leader Alexei Navalny and in 2022 fled to Poland, where he and his wife, Irina, got asylum. In 2023, after catching him with another woman, Irina told his fellow exiles he had been spying on them for the FSB. The next summer, Polish authorities arrested him after a parcel addressed to him turned out to contain bomb components. He was sentenced to seven years and Irina to three for carrying his notes on fellow exiles into Russia. Polish officials call the parcel a Russian plot, but evidence points to a Ukrainian bomb bound for Russia, which would make Rogov both an FSB informant and a link in Kyiv's sabotage chain.

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02 • 19 Minute Read

The 19th

Chabeli Carrazana

You’ll do anything for your baby. The algorithm knows how to exploit that.

Baby products and algorithms story image

Ellen FitzGerald's newborn son woke the moment he touched his bassinet, three or four times a night. Scrolling to stay awake, she was served a $179 sleep course, a $1,995 robotic bassinet, and a $289.99 breathing monitor. She bought at least a dozen swaddles and logged every feed in an app, looking for where she'd failed. Sellers in the $60 billion baby product market target new mothers in that state, using pregnancy data and influencer sales funnels. The pitch works because American parents are older, have fewer kids, live far from family, and, with no national paid leave, often return to work within two months. Economist Emily Oster, a best-selling parenting author, says American parents already provide about 95 percent of what children need, so the purchases matter little.

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03 • 30 Minute Read

Wired

Emi Nietfeld

She’s 28, Loves God and Her Family, and Might Be the Reason You Can’t Have Kids

Emma Waters fertility technology story image

In college, Emma Waters found her politics in a JD Vance podcast interview, and after a pastor convinced her that her doubts about marriage came from girlboss feminism, she wed at 24. In 2022 she talked the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, into making her its fertility technology analyst, despite having no scientific training. Her advice for infertile couples is to clean up their diets, cut back on plastics, and trust God, and her book urges women to wield their ladles like swords. She preaches that a wife's place is at home and that wives should defer to their husbands, yet she is her family's breadwinner and relies on her mother and a relative for childcare.

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04 • 22 Minute Read

The Bitter Southerner

Beryl Gilothwest

Oh, How Lucky We Are

Ossabaw Island and Sandy West story image

In 1924, Sandy West's wealthy parents bought Ossabaw Island, an undeveloped 26,000-acre barrier island off Savannah, Georgia. West inherited it in 1958 and opened it to a residency where artists, writers, and scientists worked without obligations. By 1966, a plan to mine phosphates on a nearby island drove her to a life of outspoken conservationism, and with her money running low, she spent a decade seeking a like-minded steward for her land. Georgia agreed to buy half and take the rest as a donation in 1977, with Coca-Cola's chairman, Robert Woodruff, covering the money the state lacked. The transfer protected Ossabaw for research and education, the outcome she had fought for, but losing it still devastated her. Her grandson, Beryl Gilothwest tells her remarkable story in this great piece for The Bitter Southerner.

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She caught him with another woman. Then she exposed him as a Russian spy.

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