Hope you had a great weekend. Back at it with four more stories to break your midday doomscroll.
A nationwide camera network built to fight crime helped at least 50 police officers stalk women, including one chief who searched an ex's plate 600 times.
A stroke survivor and her daughter were evicted from their Las Vegas home right as a 108-degree heat wave hit.
More than a thousand Esperanto speakers gathered in Czechia to keep a 140-year-old dream of world peace alive.
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The Washington Post
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Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan and Aaron Schaffer
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Marci Bakely could not figure out how her ex-boyfriend always knew where she had been until he admitted it: he was using Flock. As police chief of a small Georgia town, Michael Steffman had searched her license plate roughly 600 times through the nationwide camera network built to fight crime. Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer found at least 50 officers charged with or accused of misusing Flock, often to track wives, girlfriends, and exes. Steffman was arrested on stalking charges. He died by suicide before trial. Bakely filed for a restraining order. A judge turned her down.
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The Atlantic
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Meg Bernhard
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Susie Tyson had a stroke at 30 that made Nevada's triple-digit heat dangerous to her body. On June 17, with the day's high forecast at 108 degrees, a constable arrived to evict her and her daughter Shelby from the Las Vegas apartment they had shared for nearly 20 years. Meg Bernhard followed them through casino hotels, a $1,000-a-month rent hike, and a fight to reinstate a lost housing voucher. Half of the county's homeless deaths have been heat-related. Susie could barely stand for five minutes without her back seizing. Where they would sleep next stayed an open question.
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In 1935, two Tokyo chemists synthesized a molecule with no known purpose, unaware they had set off a five-decade chain of misidentified toads, wrong theories, and hoaxes. Kimon de Greef traced how 5-MeO-DMT was later found in a single toad species, then wrongly attributed to Mesoamerican rituals by researchers convinced ducks had digested the poison for ancient priests. One scholar flung toads into a Texas duck pond to test her theory. By the late 1980s, American media turned a satirical film into a moral panic over toad licking, hospitalizing teenagers who believed the rumors. The real story was stranger still.
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The Guardian
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Katie Thornton
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More than 1,000 Esperantists from over 60 countries filled a university in Brno, Czechia, to spend eight days speaking only a language invented in 1887 by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist. Katie Thornton found railway enthusiasts, nudists, Catholic priests, and a nomadic Brazilian who had not stopped traveling since 2019. Stalin sent Esperanto speakers to gulags. The Nazis murdered its inventor's three children. Yet a free global network of homestays kept drawing new believers, many of whom learned the language just to travel for nothing. Peace, if it ever came, was still a long way off.
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