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01 • 27 Minute Read

Toronto Life

Xavier Mesquita

Selling Seduction

Justin Aguiar turned his own lonely teenage years into a pickup-artist empire, charging men tens of thousands of dollars for boot camps that promised to make them seduction masters. Xavier Mesquita traces his rise through the same lineage as Neil Strauss's The Game and today's looksmaxxing influencers. The coaching mostly meant humiliating clients and sending them out to harass women on the street. Multiple women have since accused Aguiar of sexual assault, and he was arrested in late 2025. He denies everything and remains defiant online.

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02 • 12 Minute Read

Bloomberg

Ashley Carman

The Unraveling of Podcaster Ashley Flowers' True Crime Empire

Ashley Flowers built Crime Junkie into a true-crime juggernaut, then launched Audiochuck to outgrow her own control of it. It never did. Three CEOs cycled through in three years, thirty employees left, and an internal happiness score fell from 27 to negative 34, according to Ashley Carman's reporting for Bloomberg. Plagiarism accusations have lingered, creator-partners have sued over unpaid revenue, and Flowers reportedly fired her own studio designers to steal office chairs from HomeGoods. Her fix has been to cancel a hit show and blame it on work-life balance.

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03 • 20 Minute Read

Current Affairs

Alex Skopic

A Society That Runs on Stimulants is Badly Broken

Illustration of stimulant use and overwork

Workers exhausted by modern capitalism are turning to energy drinks, caffeine, and amphetamines to chemically override exhaustion instead of resting, Alex Skopic writes for Current Affairs. He traces the pattern from gas station energy drinks and American gig workers to truckers, Wall Street traders, and CEOs, then back to Nazi Germany's amphetamine addiction and out to methamphetamine use among Southeast Asian laborers. Drawing on Jonathan Crary's 24/7, Skopic frames sleep as the last resource capitalism hasn't managed to monetize, and stimulant use as an attempt to colonize what's left of it.

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04 • 12 Minute Read

The New York Times

Christopher Maag

How a Private Equity Group Drove an Apartment Complex Into the Ground

Augustus and Beverly Grissett spent fifteen happy years at Nob Hill, once such a desirable Syracuse address that neighbors called it Snob Hill. A private equity group bought the complex in 2018 and let it fall apart, Christopher Maag reports for the New York Times. Management companies cycled through five times in four years while trash piled up, elevators broke, and fire safety systems failed. Beverly died in February. Weeks later, right after a judge ordered repairs and just before he was due to leave for her memorial, Augustus died in a fire in his own apartment.

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He charged men tens of thousands to master seduction. Multiple women say he assaulted them.

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