He furnished a Moscow apartment for his sons. A month later, police arrested him.

01 • 55 Minute Read

Texas Monthly

Michael Hardy

David Barnes, a Texas software programmer, flew to Moscow and moved into the same apartment building as his ex-wife, Svetlana Boricovna, and furnished it for the two sons she had taken to Russia in 2019. Boricovna had accused him of sexually abusing the boys, and Barnes denies it. Texas investigators and prosecutors found the evidence insufficient to charge him, and a jury declined to give her sole custody. Barnes was arrested about a month later. A Russian court, relying mainly on Boricovna's testimony and police interviews with the children, convicted him and, after an appeal, sentenced him to 22.5 years. The U.S. government has not designated him wrongfully detained, a status that would make him eligible for a prisoner swap. Now 69 and in a penal colony, he has heard that his older son, 16, wants to return to Texas but still insists the abuse happened.

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02 • 40 Minute Read

ProPublica

Jake Pearson

I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP.

Illustration of a golden crown trapping a person in a baseball cap looking at a glowing smartphone

The day after Jake Pearson lost nearly $1,800 on basketball in one night, DraftKings, a major sports betting app, invited him to try out for its VIP program. He was betting like a compulsive gambler on purpose for 10 weeks, following advice from addiction specialists, to see whether the company's "responsible gaming" safeguards would stop him. They mostly did not. The prompts he received were easy-to-dismiss pop-ups, and promotions for boosted bets often followed within hours. He deposited $21,600, played hundreds of blackjack hands in the app's casino, and was never contacted by its problem-gambling reviewers. After a self-imposed cooling-off period, his VIP host matched a $5,000 deposit with $1,250 in house money. He finished down about $10,700. DraftKings says the system worked as designed and that it closes accounts based on betting behavior, but it won't say how often.

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03 • 38 Minute Read

The Washington Post

David Nakamura and Adam Taylor

How Trump turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation

Photo from the Washington Post story on the State Department's Office of Remigration

In mid-June, a career State Department security officer named Christian Ehrhardt toured West Africa, meeting leaders to persuade them to accept flights of people deported from the United States who are not their citizens. He runs the Office of Remigration, a 15-person unit created inside the bureau that once resettled refugees. Internal records show the administration has pledged at least $410 million toward such deals with 31 countries, including $81 million paid directly to governments, with the rest routed through aid groups. Former officials say contracts were structured to skip human rights safeguards, and the effort is driven by White House aide Stephen Miller. The administration says it is removing people whose home countries refuse them, including violent criminals. Yet lawyers say deportees held in Equatorial Guinea have been beaten and denied food, which its government denies, and a federal appeals court recently ruled the policy unlawful.

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04 • 20 Minute Read

Noema Magazine

Aaron Horwath

Now Entering: The Era Of Bleh

Artwork by Daria Mussienko for Noema Magazine

Every morning, Lukas Weber, a 28-year-old copywriter at a mid-sized software company, checks on the AI agents that draft his newsletters, send client proposals and answer his email. His executives expect him not to write at all, and his coworkers and rival firms work the same way, on the same few language models. The author argues this is producing "airbrain," a sameness in content, strategy and ideas, much like the interchangeable coffee shops that social media algorithms spread across cities a decade ago. A company's edge is the combined talent of its people, so routing everything through shared AI erodes it, and skills fade with disuse. He predicts work will split between cheap AI output and premium, verifiably human craft, with oversight jobs moving to lower-cost labor. Executives may then try part-time staffing, overlooking that a job is more than its tasks.

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He furnished a Moscow apartment for his sons. A month later, police arrested him.

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