Female guests on “Dating Talk,” a YouTube show hosted by Brian Atlas, handed over their phones and could sit up to nine hours without a break while he quizzed them about their “body count” and whether women should vote. By late 2025, after about three years, Atlas’s channel, Whatever, had grown to nearly 5 million subscribers, and its confrontations were cut into short clips that spread across TikTok and Instagram. Right-wing figures including Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens had appeared. Some guests said they came to push back on far-right ideas, while others described the shoots as exhausting or abusive. Researchers who study extremism argued the clips taught young men that women are manipulative and dating is hopeless, exploiting real loneliness for ad revenue and viewer donations. Atlas did not respond to requests for comment. Experts suggested parents learn the movement’s vocabulary and ask boys who profits from it.
In 1990, freelance writer Janice Pottker published an 11,000-word magazine profile of the Feld family, owners of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. According to later depositions, Ken Feld, who had inherited the circus from his father, was furious and vowed revenge. His company hired Clair George, a former CIA spy chief pardoned for lying to Congress. George later swore that the operation compiled reports on Pottker and on animal-rights groups, and that Feld arranged her 1995 book deal on the Mars candy family to keep her away from the circus. The campaign came to light in 1997, after Feld fired his top aide, Chuck Smith, during an internal feud and the lawsuits that followed opened the files. Smith contacted Pottker, and she sued Feld for $11 million. George has since partly backed away from his affidavit, saying he signed it under pressure, and her case remains unresolved.
In a snowstorm, Nick Popovich flew from Chicago to South Carolina to seize a Gulfstream jet for a lender, and when one of the armed men guarding it put a gun to his head, he flew the plane home anyway. Popovich, a pilot from Hammond, Indiana, got into repossession in 1979, when a banker friend paid him handsomely to recover a small Cessna. His firm now chases jets and boats for banks like Citibank, earning up to $900,000 on the hardest jobs. Because debtors hide their aircraft, he relies on scouts, legal paperwork, and disguises. Business booms when credit collapses, but the work is dangerous. He was beaten and jailed in Haiti in the 1980s, and repo work kills an estimated one or two people a year.
In January 2013, a Wikipedia editor called Qworty made 14 edits to the page of the late Southern novelist Barry Hannah, cutting praise and changing his cause of death from a heart attack to alcoholism. Qworty, who had logged about 13,000 edits since 2007, had also been rewriting pages of authors who drew his ire, including novelist Amanda Filipacchi after she criticized sexism on the site. A group of Wikipedia critics identified him as Robert Clark Young, a novelist who had publicly attacked Hannah after a poorly received workshop with him in 2001. Young first denied it, calling himself tech-deficient, then confessed on Wikipedia in May 2013, insisting his edits followed the rules. He was barred from editing biographies of living people and later blocked indefinitely. The case raised questions about how long one editor’s grudges had shaped a site millions of people trust.
