In 2008, Todd Humphreys built a GPS spoofer from off-the-shelf parts on his apartment floor and watched a blue dot race down his street on Google Maps. The signal was fake. Katherine Dunn traces how Humphreys spent the next decade proving that civilian GPS, the invisible utility threading through aviation, shipping, and warfare, could be hijacked without triggering a single alarm. The demonstration that landed hardest: a graduate student redirected an $80 million superyacht two degrees off course in the Aegean, the health-check light stayed green, and no one on board noticed until the spoofer switched off and the screen jumped to show where the yacht actually was. Humphreys has since stopped running his own experiments. He no longer needs to.
Taylor Mitchem's baby arrived in March 2020, the same week the world shut down. Isolated, unsupported, and managing anxiety and ADHD largely alone, she resumed a daily cannabis habit when her child was two and a half. Sarah Levy profiles the "garden mom" subculture built on TikTok, where mothers post morning smoking rituals and credit weed with making them calmer, more patient parents. Researchers are not convinced. Cannabis dependence develops in at least one in ten regular users, daily use can worsen anxiety over time, and current THC concentrations reaching 90 percent make it a different drug than earlier generations used. What feels like a coping tool may be treating withdrawal symptoms the drug itself created.
A writer spent weeks inside Fishtank Live, a 24/7 unedited internet reality show run from the basement of a suburban Atlanta mansion, where six to ten strangers compete under constant CCTV surveillance while a paying audience hurls real-time insults through speakers. Creator Sam Hyde built the show as a reality-TV parody after getting blacklisted from Adult Swim; current showrunner Jet Neptune has grown it to more than 500,000 regular viewers and a claimed $30 million valuation on a sub-million-dollar budget. Contestants have smoked crack on camera, fought with boxing gloves against producers, and poured urine on each other. Neptune frames it as exposure therapy for shut-ins. Whether transformation or pure spectacle is the point is a question the show seems designed never to settle.
Autism diagnostician and autistic adult Sarah Hendrickx makes the case that the same traits clinically coded as deficits can generate a category of pleasure most neurotypical people never access. Insatiable curiosity, the drive to find patterns and connections, the capacity for total immersion in a subject, and a sensory attunement that sharpens the textures of the ordinary world can produce what Hendrickx and the autistic people she interviews describe as something close to euphoria. The diagnostic framing has always emphasized impairment. But the autistic adults quoted here describe the intense-interest state in terms most people reserve for falling in love. Whether that joy is portable into the broader world is a different question.
