Happy Monday. Today's lineup runs from a suburb of Austin to the surface of Mars, with stops in wartime Kyiv and a camera shop in Eagle Rock.

Ukrainian journalists are filing investigations with 90 minutes of electricity a day. NASA's most promising Mars mission just got defunded while China prepares to beat us to the finish line. A fake Delta Force veteran spent a decade extracting $12 million from hockey parents and clock collectors by convincing them cartels wanted them dead. And Jason Lee, the My Name Is Earl guy who opened an analog camera shop, agreed to a profile, then tried to have it killed when the journalist asked about Scientology.

Good lunch, good reads.

Brett

Four years into a full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian investigative journalists are still publishing. The challenge is surviving long enough to do it. Reporting by OCCRP's Ilya Lozovsky profiles the women running newsrooms in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro through the harshest winter in recent memory, with electricity rationed to as little as 90 minutes a day and bombs falling nearly every night. Most of these journalists are women managing young children while their husbands are at the front. At the Kyiv Independent, office temperatures have dropped to 8 degrees Celsius. Reporters describe sleeping in ski pants, heating bricks on gas stoves, and commuting from suburbs after their neighborhoods were struck. The US withdrawal of foreign aid funding at the start of 2025 wiped out key journalism grants overnight, and at least one outlet worked for free for eight months before finding replacement support. Despite this, the investigations haven't stopped: war crimes documentation, corruption exposés, drone parts supply chains. As one editor put it, the energy comes when you discover something. A new generation of young journalists, who could have chosen something easier, keeps choosing this.

Read our round-up of Russia-Ukraine War reporting here.

NASA's Perseverance rover found something remarkable in July 2024: rocks bearing spotted and seeded patterns that, on Earth, are almost exclusively produced by microbial life. Getting those rocks home was always the plan. The Mars Sample Return mission, a joint NASA-European project decades in the making, was designed to do exactly that. But the program spiraled from a $5.3 billion estimate to a potential $11 billion, with revised timelines pushed to the 2040s. An independent review found no credible baseline for cost or schedule. Congressional enthusiasm evaporated. A January spending bill provided zero funding. The mission is now dead. Meanwhile, China has been methodically building toward Mars. Its lunar sample return missions have worked flawlessly, its Tianwen-3 Mars mission is formally announced, and its published plans target 500 grams of Martian rock back on Earth by 2031. The US prepared the scientific groundwork for decades. China may collect the prize. Scientists are watching the situation with a mix of anger and disbelief, knowing the Perseverance sample tubes may sit on the Martian surface indefinitely, gathering dust while another nation's orbiter passes overhead.

Read here.

Kota Youngblood spent years at a north Austin youth hockey rink introducing himself as just another parent. He had military tattoos, spoke in a low murmur, and dropped careful hints about government contacts and Special Forces service. None of it was true. His real name was Dennis Schuler Jr., from Ohio. His only employment had been selling used cars. Over roughly a decade, he built an elaborate confidence scheme around two parallel communities: suburban hockey families and a circle of elderly clock collectors. His method was the same in both worlds. He built genuine friendship, identified each person's specific vulnerability, then invented a crisis only he could resolve, usually involving Mexican cartels and assassination contracts. He wove victims into each other's stories so each one confirmed the other's fear. One victim lost over a million dollars and had to sell their home. Another, real-estate developer Eric Perardi, spent $900,000 before discovering the Confederate flag Youngblood gave him as collateral was worth a fraction of what he claimed. Matthew Bremner's Rolling Stone account reconstructs the scheme through trial testimony and interviews with victims, FBI agents, and the federal prosecutor, who called it the cruelest fraud he had ever seen. Youngblood was convicted on five counts in 2024 and sentenced to 40 years. He maintains his innocence from prison.

Read here.

Kim Tobman knows how to build giants. Having previously led businesses like Savage X Fenty and President of SKIMS, she turns digital shops into household names.

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Nate Rogers went to Eagle Rock Camera & Goods in Los Angeles to write a friendly profile of Jason Lee, the pro skater turned actor who opened an analog camera shop in 2023. He ended up with something more complicated. Lee, who went pro as a teenager in the 1980s, pushed skating's 360 flip into mainstream prominence before walking away from the sport entirely, then building a decade-long acting career (Mallrats, Chasing Amy, My Name Is Earl) before walking away from that too. The camera shop was another reinvention: part retail, part community space, with donuts and film in the refrigerator.

Rogers writes warmly about Lee's creative restlessness and the way skateboarding's DIY culture shaped his willingness to start over. The profile nearly didn't happen at all. When Rogers asked about Scientology, a religion Lee was publicly affiliated with for years before quietly stepping away, Lee cut him off and spent an hour debating the ethics of the question. Lee's publicist later pressured the original magazine to kill the story. They did. Rogers then brought it to Defector, where Lee's lawyers sent a cease-and-desist. The piece ran anyway. Eagle Rock Camera closed in February.

Read Lee’s ex-wife Carmen Llywelyn’s essay about leaving the Church of Scientology here. If you want to learn more about the dark side of Scientology, I highly recommend The Underground Bunker by Tony Ortega.

Read here.