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The weekend is in sight! Just two more lunch breaks to go.
Today's edition includes:
Life insurance influencers are posting Ferrari reels and recruiting followers into MLM downlines where three in four agents make under $5,000 a year.
Microsoft's GCC High got FedRAMP's cybersecurity approval despite five years of unanswered questions, two major federal hacks, and reviewers who called the package "a pile of shit."
Harvey Prager, Harvard dropout turned Caribbean weed kingpin, proposed the most unusual drug sentence in U.S. history: fund and run an AIDS hospice with his drug money.
The U.S.-Iran war is three weeks in, the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, and Iran's cheap mines and drones are rewriting who actually controls how this ends.
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The Baffler
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Julia Kopstein
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Life insurance has a new sales force: shirtless influencers posting Ferrari reels and grindset sermons on Instagram. Julia Kopstein traces how the industry evolved from church burial clubs to door-to-door salesmen to MLM-adjacent outfits like Primerica and World Financial Group, which now recruit micro-influencers to perform wealth online and funnel followers into downlines. At People Helping People, 75 percent of active agents made under $5,000 in 2022. The actual product barely appears in any of it. The performance of prosperity is the pitch.
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For nearly five years, federal cybersecurity reviewers at FedRAMP asked Microsoft to produce basic encryption diagrams for its GCC High government cloud product. Microsoft never fully complied. The reviewers concluded they had "a lack of confidence in assessing the system's overall security posture." They approved it anyway, because the product was already running across the Justice and Energy departments and the defense sector. Today, with DOGE having gutted FedRAMP's staff and budget to historic lows, critics say the program is a rubber stamp. The "unknown unknowns" inside GCC High remain unresolved.
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Rolling Stone
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Jack Crosbie
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Harvard dropout Harvey Prager spent a decade running marijuana from Colombia to the northeastern U.S. on sailboats, building a small Caribbean empire and partying with Jimmy Buffett on St. Barts before the cartels and the Reagan drug war ended that era. When Scotland Yard found his passport in the wreckage of a London bank heist, Prager turned himself in and proposed one of the most unusual sentences in federal history: fund and personally run an AIDS hospice with his drug proceeds. The judge agreed. Prager is now 78, a civil rights attorney in Brooklyn, and the author's downstairs neighbor.
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The Atlantic
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Nancy Youssef & Missy Ryan
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Three weeks into the U.S.-Iran war, Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, and the strategic leverage has quietly shifted to Tehran. The U.S. has struck over 9,000 targets and degraded roughly 90 percent of Iran's ballistic-missile capability, but cheap drones and an estimated 5,000 mines in reserve have disrupted global oil markets and left the Trump administration pushing to negotiate. Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak warned of a war of attrition. The U.S. mine-clearing fleet is aging, undermanned, and partly in Singapore for maintenance. Iran doesn't need to win; it needs only to endure.
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