Markuss Hussle takes a 50 percent cut of the women he manages on OnlyFans, then sells $8,000 courses teaching other young men how to do the same. Amelia Gentleman spent months inside this shadow industry of self-styled OnlyFans managers, talking to former recruiters and creators who describe relentless pressure to do more explicit content, contracts that trap women for years, and Telegram groups where performers are bought and sold like inventory. One former recruiter calls it plainly. It's exploiting, it's grooming, it's predatory.
In 1995, Alison Hargreaves became the first woman to summit Everest without oxygen. Ninety days later she vanished on K2, swept off the mountain in a windstorm with her body never recovered. Twenty four years on, her son Tom Ballard set out to follow her path into the Himalayas, chasing the same need for money, meaning, and distance from an ordinary life. Tim Struby traces both expeditions in parallel, mother and son separated by decades but bound by the same mountains. Their bodies now lie less than 120 miles apart, neither one ever brought home.
Ashley Delgado died on a Cleveland street in 2023 with a folded scrap of tan powder tucked into her bra. The drug that killed her was a nitazene, a synthetic opioid that can be 40 times stronger than fentanyl and barely shows up on standard toxicology screens. Jonathan Moens spent months tracing how Ohio became ground zero for these compounds, from Chinese chemical suppliers exploiting regulatory loopholes to a Maserati stuffed with 100,000 pills crossing from Canada. Dealers call it a brand. Families call it something else entirely.
Jim Henson wanted a rock star to play his goblin king, and considered Sting and Michael Jackson before landing on David Bowie. Ann Lee gathers the cast and crew of Labyrinth, now 40 years removed from a film that bombed at the box office and went on to become a cult classic. Puppeteers remember Bowie hanging out in the workshop with a pint, breaking character at the sight of a befuddled puppet, and treating the whole production like a holiday from his usual relentless work ethic. What turned a flop into a phenomenon is its own kind of mystery.
