Zoe Watts Drug-Facilitated Rape Survival and #EndEyeCheck Campaign

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01 • 16 Minute Read

The Guardian

Anna Moore

'The bed you thought was safe, isn't safe': how Zoe Watts survived drug-facilitated rape – and fought back

For years, Zoe Watts's husband slipped sedatives into her evening tea, raped her as she slept, and filmed it. She had no memory of any of it, only symptoms: exhaustion, confusion, infections doctors could never explain. Anna Moore reports how Watts found a second survivor, Amanda Stanhope, and learned she was far from alone. Together they founded #EndEyeCheck, the first survivor-led campaign against drug-facilitated rape. Watts emailed prosecutors ten times a day until they charged him, and he drew eleven years. Hundreds of women have since filled out their survey, each one having believed the same thing: that it only happened to her.

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02 • 39 Minute Read

The Baffler

S. C. Cornell

The Reluctant Migrant

Crime scene photo outside the Arroyo Motel in Nogales

Marisol García Alcántara was sitting in the back of a stopped car near the Arizona border when a Border Patrol agent fired one shot through the windshield. The bullet lodged in her brain, too deep to remove. She lived. S. C. Cornell uses her 2021 shooting to trace how the Border Patrol became a force that can kill with near-total impunity, protected by a hundred-mile "Constitution-free zone" and Supreme Court rulings that closed off the right to sue. Agents have killed at least ninety-four people since 2005. Not one has been convicted. Her case goes to trial this winter.

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03 • 14 Minute Read

Scientific American

Jonathan O'Callaghan

How NASA Turned a Spy Satellite into Its New Dark Energy Telescope

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in a clean room

In 2012, Alan Dressler walked into a defense contractor's clean room and found a row of telescopes as powerful as Hubble. They were built to spy on America's enemies, and a spy agency was offering one to NASA for free. Jonathan O'Callaghan traces how that surplus satellite became the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Congress saved the project from cancellation five times. It launches soon, under budget, to map the dark energy pulling the universe apart. It carries an experimental instrument that blocks a star's glare to reveal the planets beside it. If it works, it could find life.

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04 • 9 Minute Read

The Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku and Faiz Siddiqui

Her childhood photo. Thousands of explicit images. One woman's nightmare.

Jane Doe 4 came home to Wyoming to find her hometown street full of police. They were there for her stepfather, who had fed a childhood photo of her into Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, and generated thousands of explicit fake images. Nitasha Tiku and Faiz Siddiqui report that he was released the same day, because the company's report to the national tip line included none of the images it should have. Two days later he killed himself. Jane has now joined a federal lawsuit against xAI. Whether the law can touch what the company built is still an open question.

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She thought she was sick. Her husband was drugging her.

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