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01 • 30 Minute Read

The New York Times

Jon Ronson

He Was a Top Lawn Care Influencer on YouTube. Then Everything Went Haywire.

I will read anything Jon Ronson writes, and I am excited for his forthcoming book that is excerpted here in the New York Times. He follows Greg Chism, an early YouTube influencer whose videos with his daughters drew 13 billion views between January 2016 and June 2017. In 2017, parents discovered the YouTube Kids app was feeding their children videos of cartoon characters being tortured and killed. Internet sleuths went looking for whoever made them, and Chism was the only creator they could identify, despite him never being involved. His life came apart within months. Ronson watched the clips that damned him and found something else.

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02 • 15 Minute Read

ABC News

Lauren Day and Matt Henry

Inside Próspera, the libertarian utopia on a Caribbean island off the coast of Honduras

Alice Chen dropped out of her Canadian PhD program and flew to Roatán to test a live algae drink she says adds 20 years to a human life. In Próspera, a private city on the Honduran island, businesses pick their own regulations from a menu of 30 countries. Lauren Day and Matt Henry walked the 58-acre campus, talked to biohackers with implants under their skin, and met the villagers next door who call it colonialism. Investors include funds tied to Thiel, Altman, and Andreessen. Honduras tried to shut it down and lost. Brimen now talks about 100,000 residents.

Read the Story →

03 • 14 Minute Read

Smithsonian Magazine

Helen Sullivan

Africa's Wild Dogs Are the Most Hated Carnivores on the Continent. Here's Why Some Conservationists Are Saving Them Anyway

Africa's wild dogs kill 80 percent of what they hunt, which is why game reserve owners and subsistence farmers shoot them. But now, only 6,600 remain. Helen Sullivan traveled to the Waterberg with the Endangered Wildlife Trust, which flies dogs in from Mozambique to build genetically diverse packs, and watched one of three newly arrived sisters die of heat and stress before sundown. Cole du Plessis, who runs the relocation program, spent the next year darting males and driving them across provinces to find the survivors a mate.

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04 • 17 Minute Read

Aeon	Peter A Coclanis

The Singapore strategies

In 1965 Malaysia's prime minister told a British diplomat that if Singapore stepped out of line, he could always turn off the water in Johor. Singapore never forgot, and a half a century later, their investment in reservoirs, recycling, desalination will allow the country to supply an estimated 85 percent of its own water by 2061. They tried the same trick with food, pledging in 2019 to grow 30 percent of what it eats on 1 percent of its land. Peter Coclanis watched that plan die last November. He thinks the failure was baked in from the day it was announced.

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Greg Chism's videos got 13 billion views. Then the SWAT team came.

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