Crypto, Ambassador & Decline

Featured Reading

The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison

Wired • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~11400 words
By Andy Greenberg

Andy Greenberg chronicles the ordeals of Tigran Gambaryan, a former IRS agent and Binance compliance officer, who was detained in Nigeria. Lured to Nigeria under the guise of resolving issues between Binance and the Nigerian government, he becomes a pawn in a multibillion-dollar extortion scheme.

Still, for months to come, the US government wouldn’t intervene in Gambaryan’s criminal prosecution. The result, for Frentzen, was an appalling situation: After a career in the federal service, the former IRS agent responsible for many of the biggest cryptocurrency criminal busts and seizures in history was left with only hands-off government support in the midst of what appeared to be, itself, a crypto shakedown.

Life and Death at the Ambassador Hotel

Places Journal • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~7850 words
By Stathis G. Yeros

When the AIDS epidemic was in full swing, the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco became a sanctuary for those affected by the crisis, transforming from a residential hotel into a vibrant community center. Stathis G. Yeros explores how activists and residents created a unique model of care and kinship, defying societal stigma and offering support to individuals from diverse backgrounds. The Ambassador’s legacy also had an impact on today’s conversations around healthcare and community.

By acknowledging that people with AIDS had sexual identities, the Ambassador embraced residents’ basic humanity and flouted the timidity of more mainstream LBGT advocacy, which was at that point minimizing allusions to sex in hopes of making people with HIV seem deserving of care.

Nearly everyone who worked at the Ambassador was simultaneously dealing with the disease in their personal lives. Some, like Wilson and Calvanese, contended with the anxieties of living with HIV, and most employees and volunteers had close friends or family members who had died. Within the building, AIDS was a familiar plight — a point of connection, a common bond, a shared grief.

Permanent Decline

The Point Magazine • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~10850 words
By Leif Weatherby

Leif Weatherby offers an analysis of Aaron Rodgers’ career as it declined, framing it within the context of societal shifts and struggles.

The game’s violence and its relationship to America itself has been the topic of football from the beginning. To win a Super Bowl, as Aaron did, is to become a hero in the American epic, to found—or refound—a city, like Gilgamesh, or Aeneas.

America can’t throw off that founding violence, and neither can Aaron. “Going soft” is part of the story of being unable to secure legitimacy after you win, after there’s a state, a government, a grown-ass man, in place. The question stops being about the violence itself, and starts being about knowledge of violence. It stops being action too fast for reflection, and starts being narrative. It is at this moment that the quarterback becomes a talking head.

Recommended Reading

Age of Invention: How Coal Really Won

Age of Invention • Published on 2025-02-12 • ~11800 words
By Anton Howes

Anton Howes continues tracing the history of the rise of coal, and how it transformed not just heating practices but also the economy and daily life in growing urban centers. The essay provides rich historical detail, as it highlights the interplay between technology, culture, and societal change during a pivotal era.

But seven years on, the sulphurous stink of London’s breweries had become so great that it put the queen off from visiting the city at all if she could avoid it. Apparently assaulting her senses whenever her barge wended its way down the Thames, in early 1586 the authorities ordered the brewers to cease their burning of coal along the river. This time, however, the brewers responded in a way that reveals just far the use of the wood-saving art had spread. The city’s dyers and hatmakers, they said, as well as the brewers, had now all “long since altered their furnaces and fire places and turned the same to the use and burning of sea coal.” Dutifully, they offered to switch two or three of the breweries nearest to the Palace of Westminster back to burning wood, though pointed out that even just this would have a huge effect on the city’s fuel supplies, consuming a whopping 2,000 loads of wood per year.

In Somalia’s Faltering Shadow War Against al-Shabab, Recruits Are Victims on and off the Battlefield

New Lines Magazine • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~5400 words
By Mohamed Gabobe

Mohamed Gabobe shares the harrowing journey of a Somali soldier who faced unimaginable hardships during his training in Eritrea and subsequent battles against al-Shabab. Through the eyes of this whistleblower, this piece provides insight into the brutal realities of Somalia’s ongoing conflict, the disillusionment of soldiers, and the traumas they face.

Upon entering the training camp in Gergera, the Somali cadets were each given a piece of bread and soup, then herded inside. What followed was 18 months of harsh, nonstop military training.

A few onlookers glanced our way as they trekked past us, maybe wondering why this young man was crying profusely or why I kept patting him on the back. Some memories, no matter how difficult, stay with you forever and Hersi is living proof. He composed himself and continued.

The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without consent?

The Guardian • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~5600 words
By Samira Shackle

A 1969 experiment in Coventry saw 21 Indian women fed chapatis baked with radioactive isotopes, without their consent. Revisiting the history behind this unsettling study explores broader issues of trust, consent, and medical ethics within vulnerable communities.

Brownlow did not think the experiment in Coventry was the worst he’d found. In Wales, he had tracked down a couple who had been unable to dress their baby for her funeral because her leg bones had been removed for Project Sunshine. By contrast, the chapati experiment had a clear, benign medical aim: studying how to reduce cases of anaemia. But the way it was conducted fit with what Brownlow was finding elsewhere. “This was a vulnerable population – in this case, a minority community which had difficulties with English – with a layer of people doing the consenting for them,” he told me.

The report said the MRC no longer had a list of participants in the study, so they could only speak to “a small number” who came forward as a result of the documentary. It’s not clear what efforts were made to reach out to these women, but no one contacted Kalbir’s mother, who was unaware of this local investigation. The only mention of the women’s perspectives is the single sentence saying two of them did not recall giving consent.

Should weight-loss drugs be given to children?

Financial Times • Published on 2025-02-11 • ~2500 words
By Hanna Kuchler

As obesity rates climb, the debate over prescribing weight-loss drugs to children is also intensifying. Hannah Kuchler explores the experiences of teenagers like Chloe, who see these medications as a lifeline, while experts voice concerns about the potential long-term impacts on their developing bodies.

… a battle over how to treat childhood obesity is brewing between two groups who each believe their approach has young people’s best interests at heart. On one side are scientists and clinicians, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, who want to use the drugs, combined with lifestyle changes, to stop obesity in its tracks. On the other are doctors and researchers who worry that we have no idea how the weight-loss jabs will shape children’s growing bodies, still less their long-term health.

The Long Flight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate

The New Yorker • Published on 2025-02-10 • ~7400 words
By Nick Paumgarten

Over fifty-one days, Johannes Fritz leads a flock of these unique birds on a migration from Germany to Spain, employing a microlight aircraft and a dedicated team of volunteers. Nick Paumgarten writes about these efforts that he describes as “quixotic.”

Our devastation of nature is so deep and vast that to reverse its effects, on any front, often entails efforts that are so painstaking and quixotic as to border on the ridiculous.

I had an uncommonly intense sense of our implacable need to bend nature to our will, for both good and ill. The air stank of fertilizer, of the excrement we spread to grow food for ourselves. The miracle of flight, the cycle of poop and protein, our elaborate efforts to undo harm: what creatures we are.