He robbed an armored van of €3 million. He wanted to build an orphanage.

01 • 30 Minute Read

Atavist Magazine

Matthew Wolfe

Matthew Wolfe takes us on a journey in this new piece in The Atavist. In December 2013, two masked figures robbed a Loomis armored van in Vienna of nearly three million euros, the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The mastermind, a man named Gabriel, turned out to be a former officer in the city’s elite police tactical unit, who had gone on to run a private security firm, and his accomplice, Tamara, was a woman who had worked at Loomis scheduling the cash routes. Gabriel had become consumed by the poverty he witnessed while training police in Gabon and dreamed of building an orphanage there. But when charities refused to fund his dreams, he decided to steal the money.

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02 • 16 Minute Read

ProPublica

Christopher Osher and Evan Wyloge

Regulators Knew This Marijuana Product Was Harming People. It Stayed on Shelves for More Than a Year.

Illustration for the ProPublica marijuana sleep pill investigation

In March 2022, a Colorado surgical assistant named Jenifer Chatting began taking a legal marijuana-based sleep pill, 1906 Midnight Drops, on her dispensary’s recommendation. That same month, state health officials received their first report that the product was damaging people’s livers. Regulators took four months to post anything, and the notice they posted was labeled informational rather than a safety warning, so it never told consumers to stop. A real warning came fifteen months later. By then Chatting had taken the pills for over a year. She now has cirrhosis at 53 and will need a transplant. The Denver Gazette and ProPublica found regulators average more than seven months to warn the public, against two months for the FDA on tainted food. The manufacturer settled with the state for $400,000, denying wrongdoing.

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03 • 30 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Olga Khazan

When Meditation Makes You Feel Worse

Willoughby Britton was a devoted meditator and doctoral student in clinical psychology when she ran a study in 2004 expecting to prove that meditation improves sleep. It showed the opposite, and she buried the results rather than criticize the practice she believed in. Over the following years she began dissociating from her own body after meditating three hours a day, watched two people arrive at her psychiatric hospital in psychosis from the same retreat center, and realized researchers rarely found harms because they never asked about them. Her landmark 2017 study, written with her partner Jared Lindahl, documented anxiety, panic, delusions, and lasting impairment among meditators. Later research suggests roughly one in ten experience adverse effects. She now runs Cheetah House, a nonprofit serving 200 people a month who were hurt by meditation.

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04 • 28 Minute Read

The Hollywood Reporter

Stephen Zeitchik

Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary: “Insane a Person This Chaotic Has So Much Power”

Alex Gibney, noted documentarian who exposed the Church of Scientology in his 2015 Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, has turned his sights on Elon Musk. Through this documentary, which debuts later this year, Gibney makes the case that Musk is dangerous huckster, a conman, who has built façade after façade to give himself power, and that, despite each of his big promises crumbling when thrust into the spotlight, he is doing lasting damage to democracy itself. This cover story from The Hollywood Reporter is not the usual fare I recommend here, but I enjoyed reading the journey Gibney has taken with his forthcoming documentary.

The director pauses, remembering a moment from his reporting. “Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else.” The suffering will pile up, Gibney says, until we see what’s behind Toto’s curtain.

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He robbed an armored van of €3 million. He wanted to build an orphanage.

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