In the early years of Instagram, I fell down a particularly niche and unexpected well: cake decorating. Something about the pretty colors and swirly textures tickled a part of my brain I hadn’t known existed. This was during the years I was traveling to anywhere from three to six countries a year — places like Rwanda, Guatemala, Lebanon, Congo, with occasional side trips to visit friends abroad. Sometimes, mid-trip, I would swing through New York, unpack a bag so I could pack a bigger one to head off into the world again for a new story.

(Aside: Ninety percent of these trips were partially or entirely self-funded. Oftentimes, I’d be given a free flight to say, Istanbul, to speak at a conference (in that case an “atrocities” conference, which still cracks my black humor up), and then I’d pay to fly myself to the Syrian border to report. So before you think any of this was glamourous, consider that and the fleabag hotels I’ve slept in while in dusty, ugly, dangerous places.)

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I know I’ve spoken about this before, but over the years, my coping mechanisms for dealing with the trauma I’ve witnessed in my work have shifted. To try to exorcise the pain, at various points I’ve tried: drinking, arguing with my partner, not sleeping and just writing nonstop; I once wrote eight 2,000-word stories in 10 days. But then there was the sweet escape of…icing, of all things.

Cake decorating soon became flower arrangements — the fuzzier, more florid and wilder the better. I wanted fringed stalks mixed with millions of soft petals in strange concoctions of color and texture.

As you can probably imagine, none of these things really solved the underlying problem, one I wasn’t even all that consciously aware of. That trauma was written on my body, and I was going about my life as if it were all entirely fine and normal.

But it was not normal the time I flew back from meeting girls and women living at the Turkey-Syria border in crumbled stone structures or sweltering tents made of tarps and cardboard; it was not normal to break down in my marbled-and-mirrored Istanbul hotel because I couldn’t understand why I got to live like this, while they didn’t even have running water. I wished I could have scooped up every one of those women and girls and given them at least a chance to take a shower in my polished hotel room. Every time I returned home, I would have culture shock in the city I have called home my entire life. Nothing made sense.

As I said in my last post, I’m working on a magazine story about another, “lighter” obsession in my life: the bizarro world of niche perfume collectors. It has a shadowy twist — more on that when it publishes — and I’m hoping to expand it into other projects.

Considering that most of my career has been spent in the dark corners of life, I’m trying to reconcile writing about this new thing — to not feel that it is frivolous, that I’m allowed a break from the heaviness. I spent years shopping around a book proposal about the story I covered in Congo for seven years only to be told by publishers that they loved the writing and the story, but that it was “too dark” for readers.

I interpreted that to mean “too Black African,” because honestly, if my book were to be about white babies in Brooklyn being kidnapped and raped en masse, I’m pretty sure I would have gotten that contract.

So each day as I go through editing on this new story, I’m considering how my new obsession connects to my old one (global trauma). And I think I’m getting close. Instead of writing about how the lighter perfume fixation has “healed” me, or that moving to Seattle has “healed” me, I think the story may live somewhere in the obsessiveness itself. Why are we so compelled to describe what we witness — to insist, over and over, “I saw this, it was real”? Why does a bottle of scent now feel like it needs describing as urgently as a war zone once did? What does obsession cost, and who decides which obsessions are allowed to be taken seriously?

And, for me, specifically: What happens when the thing you’re obsessed with stops being a distraction from the witnessing — and becomes another way of doing it?

Maybe that’s the real confession: It was never about the flowers, or the frosting, or even the war. It was about needing, always, to make something out of what I couldn’t hold. I’m beginning to think that nobody gets to tell me which things are small enough to leave undescribed.

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“Can’t you sprinkle in some stories that are…lighter?”

That’s what my therapist would ask me year after year, as PTSD settled in from all my reporting on rape and other atrocities in war zones.

“No,” I’d say. “I really can’t.”

I felt no desire to “go lighter.” I found my work fulfilling and fascinating. Like the time I spent eight hours in the Jordanian desert watching the preparations of a 15-year-old Syrian girl who was getting married in a refugee camp. She had her makeup done like a geisha and her stifling, white nylon dress had been lovingly carried to her across the caravan-riddled compound. At one point in the day, some men beckoned me into a hot tent, where they passed me flip-phones from their seats around the circular edge of the structure, so I could watch with my own eyes videos of Syrians being repeatedly stabbed after they were already dead.

That was not something I needed to see. But it was something I saw nevertheless, and into the trauma bank it went.

Then there was the time I was at the Syrian border in Turkey, where bombs were audible in the near distance and where I met with a woman whose back had been broken in the ongoing war. She spoke to me, crying, from a dismal hospital bed, describing how her family members had been killed.

Then there were the seven years I spent reporting on the 50 little girls raped in a small, lush, ramshackle Congolese village called Kavumu. I will never forget arriving at nearby Panzi Hospital, where the hospital director, Dr. Denis Mukwege, would go on to win the Nobel Prize. It was my first morning in Bukavu, in eastern DRC, and I met a 3-, 5- and 6-year-old, each of whom had been gang-raped the previous night. One wore a tutu and rolled around on her bed smiling through her pain meds as her mother sat beside her, torn in a way only a mother with a violated child can be.

There was the cemetery I toured hidden in the woods in a suburb outside Kyiv, where two Ukrainian women and various soldiers had been anonymously buried. A black-robed priest wearing a massive cross showed me around, describing the way the residents had been murdered — or at least describing the states in which they had been found dead, leading to speculative causes of death.

Clearly, I could go on.

But a few years ago, one reporting trip left me so ill, so empty, I could barely write after a flurry of stories.

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Over the years, I’ve tended to work my way through trauma with varying forms of self-destruction until I landed on writing, and writing some more. After one trip to Congo, I came home and somehow wrote eight 2,000-word stories in about 10 days. But this trip flipped a switch closed for me.

I’d been invited to Auschwitz for a press tour. I decided to go so that I could again head to Ukraine afterward, carrying my billion pounds of an armored press vest, helmet, first-aid kit, camera and recording equipment, etc. It was only 17 more hours from Warsaw to Kyiv, by train (the war has made it so you can’t fly into Kyiv). Was that really much farther to travel when I’d already spent a day of my life flying from Seattle to Poland?

But the day I arrived in Auschwitz was October 7, 2023, the day of Hamas’s massacre in Israel.

As a Jewish American (with roots in Eastern Europe’s pogroms), I felt remarkably unsafe in the region and wanted to get home as quickly as possible. Perhaps my fears were unfounded, but I was worried about possible hijackings at the very least. So I spent my few days reporting at Auschwitz and wrote as many stories as I could. (I particularly like this one.) I decided not to go on to Ukraine — “only” a 17-hour train ride away — a decision that meant I would never see a dear friend again, as he would later die of a brain tumor.

On my last day in Auschwitz, I experienced two very powerful things. The first was being told by my tour guide that we, a group of journalists specifically invited to attend a few days at the camp, were “bystanders,” like everyone else, imploring us to act, to not live our lives passively. It was not a short speech. And the more he said that word, bystander, the angrier I got. I finally interjected:

“As journalists, we are not ‘bystanders,” I vehemently said. “We are witnesses.”

The guide sort of waved this away and continued. My anger mounted.

I broke into his monologue to explain the case of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was 28 when she was murdered in Queens, N.Y., in 1964. It was the middle of the night. A man stabbed her in the back and stalked her through her own apartment complex, raping and finally stabbing her to death. Soon after, The New York Times reported that no one had tried to help Genovese. That despite her cries being heard by many in the densely packed complex, no one had cared enough to get involved. The result of the murder led to decades of study of what psychologists dubbed the “bystander effect,” in which no one lifts a finger to help someone while surrounded by other witnesses.

But the story of what happened the night of Genovese’s murder was proven incorrect. A number of neighbors had called the police. And there was no evidence to show that others had heard anything and didn’t act.

As I described this to our group at Auschwitz-Birkenau, my voice broke. I was surprised to feel tears in my eyes. People do act. People do try to help. Rather than press my point, I walked away, considering why I’d finally broken down.

My entire career — my life — is built on the premise of doing something. Whether it is “merely” witnessing — listening to traumatic stories that someone is sharing for the first time — or writing about what they endured, or taking evidence I’ve gathered in a war zone to the International Criminal Court, or helping to catch the gang rapist and his group that had assaulted the girls in that Congolese village — and then going on to raise $20,000 for their medical and psychological care — I care and I act. I am not a bystander.

But something shifted a few years ago after moving from New York City to Seattle. I’ve been learning to enjoy having a blow-up kayak in the trunk of my car so I can drive five minutes to Lake Washington and get lost on the serene water amid the spiked-pine-and-cedar shoreline.

The level of peace I’ve found in this Emerald City has changed me for the better. And, for maybe the first time in my 25-year journalism career, I’m working on a “lighter” story. It’s in editing right now, and I’d love to tell you about it but I can’t quite yet because, while it may be “light,” it’s still sensitive.

I’m trying to get back to why I started Chills: to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how journalism is made. I’m not sure if this helps, but this is my reality. Please share yours with me in the comments. And, as always, thank you for reading.

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On Feb. 28, the United States and Israel began war with Iran. Within hours you could place bets on it.

Polymarket, launched in 2020, is a cryptocurrency-based prediction market that allows traders to buy and sell shares based on the probability of world events. Since early December 2025, the site had hosted an Iran war bidding contract, and by the time the airstrikes occurred, the market had pulled $529 million in total trading volume. Someone, somewhere, had made nearly a million dollars betting on whether Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei would die. He did.

I find it unsurprising that capitalism finds profit in suffering. I was in elementary school when the 2008 financial crisis hit and watched families move off my block in Seattle as four of my friends’ fathers lost their jobs. I was young enough to have never heard of subprime mortgages but just old enough to feel like the center cannot hold. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college when I took my first film class that I watched “The Big Short.” Disasters, it seems, will always make for good content.

I’ve spent hours researching how companies like Polymarket operate and the culture that surrounds them. I will spare you most of those details. What I will not spare you of is the fact prediction markets show how our futures can turn into commodities. How betting on ceasefires, wildfires, war and suffering become profit.

When fires ripped through Los Angeles last summer, bets popped up all across Polymarket, wagering money on how many acres would be burned, where the fires would spread and when they would be extinguished. On Aug. 3, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) led a coalition of nine senators in a formal letter to the CFTC demanding a ban on wildfire markets. “Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” they wrote.

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Polymarket has responded to growing criticism with this statement: “People turn to the news for commentary and they come to Polymarket for information.”

Polymarket is not the only prediction market of its kind. Kalshi, introduced in 2021, offers similar betting and trading opportunities, however it notably does not run military or war markets. In November 2025, Kalshi’s CEO Tarek Mansour stated at a conference that the company’s long-term vision is to “financialize everything.” In recent months the two sites have grown rapidly in competition and become a sort of cultural phenomenon. As with every lucrative product, Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., have invested in them. The genius of prediction markets is that financial incentives reveal truth. People bet on what they believe and the results produce something perhaps more accurate than any poll.

A quick scan of Polymarket reveals that 44 percent of traders believe J.D. Vance will be the presidential nominee in 2028, 74 percent think that the next round of U.S.-Iran peace talks will take place by Sept. 30 and that the Blue Jays have a 93 percent chance of beating the Cubs tonight.

This type of trading is perhaps one of the clearest examples of how, under capitalism, profit will be found in every tragedy, disaster, triumph and cultural moment. It is hard to feel like the world is not slouching towards an inevitable end. It is even harder to admit we are betting on it.

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In Los Angeles, I saw more robots than I have ever seen.

These were not the robots of my childhood fantasies. They were not chrome and menacing with flat, synthetic voices. They were not scary. These were small and colorful machines rolling along the sidewalk and blinking their round, wide eyes at pedestrians who’d forgotten to look down. You couldn’t help but feel a little pity when their tiny wheels got caught on a crack.

All across Melrose Avenue Serve Robotics rolled around from restaurant to restaurant, each delivery machine labeled with its own name. Milo, Otto and Courtney, to name a few. Then there were the self-piloted Waymos gliding through West Hollywood, their shiny white exteriors decorated with hundreds of tiny cameras capturing the road and God knows what else. I stood on a corner in Silver Lake watching a row of six driverless vehicles idle at a red light, and felt something I did not expect.

I felt like a luddite.

Growing up in the early 2000s meant robots and automation was always the next thing coming. I remember watching “Wall-E” for the first time at my grandparents’ house on DVD. All of us cousins were crowded around the small screen, certain the future couldn’t possibly look like that — a world of happy little robots doing the work humans had decided was beneath them. But still we knew in the vague ways children ingest cultural anxiety that something was coming.

Growing up in the middle of the tech boom meant growing up in a waiting room.

After a week in Los Angeles, I had dinner on my last night with my friend’s mother and her boyfriend, a screenwriter. We argued over Huckleberry Finn, space travel and voting. The type of classic conversations that occur when you put two different generations together and each is feeding off their assumptions of the other. After dinner, outside the valet, the screenwriter pitched me a film. The premise was something like this: A little girl runs up to the window of a Waymo and looks inside. There is a basket, then there is an explosion and darkness. Waymos used as tools of domestic terrorism, autonomous vehicles turned into weapons with no humans to mitigate the evil intent. Genius. I told him to write it.

He shook his head. “Too dark,” he said. “It won’t sell.”

I find it interesting that a film with a technically plausible premise in a cultural moment defined by this exact anxiety — that we are being replaced — apparently “won’t sell.” We have decided, it seems, that robots are fine. Not us, exactly, but the CEOs, the investors, the startups, the advertisers, the politicians and the tech platforms that rolled out this technology at an alarming pace then shaped legislation to allow it. They decided. And now we are being fed the narrative that robots are better.

Over salty Mexican food I spoke to a friend of mine about Waymos. She, another Wesleyan student who is all too familiar with the dangers of automation and A.I., reminded me that many women would actually feel safer entering a Waymo late at night than a rideshare. We exchanged our own stories of Uber drivers with wandering eyes and even wandering hands and landed on the grim truth that maybe we too felt safer with a robot than a man at night.

What I didn’t realize that night in L.A.’s Silverlake neighborhood is that Waymo already knows that women like us are part of their pitch. How disappointing to realize that our “profound” conclusions were really just part of a marketing strategy.

In June, during the FIFA World Cup, Waymo launched its first-ever nationwide brand campaign, themed “Because.” The 60 second spot highlighted the challenges human drivers face — I can’t believe that’s a clarification I have to make — and ended with a voiceover saying, “Not because humans aren’t enough, but because they’re everything.” It’s a roundabout way of essentially saying, “We are replacing you because we love you.” It is displacement sold as devotion to the very people the technology is replacing.

In January 2026, The San Francisco Examiner ran a promotional piece paid for by Waymo titled,

“How Waymo Is Making Women Feel Safe.” Could they be more obvious? They cited an internal study that found that over half of female riders reported that their safety improved in a Waymo. “Studies show that when women feel safe, their communities benefit. Ensuring women can access safe transportation leads to stronger local economies and improved mental health, among other benefits,” the piece said. No studies were cited.

This is the conclusion we have reached. Not that we should make public spaces safer. Not that we need to hold rideshare companies responsible for reports of sexual assault — of which there were the 400,000 filed against Uber alone between 2017 and 2022. Is the conclusion we’re supposed to reach that we can replace men with machines and call it progress?

It is an unsatisfying conclusion to know we are being sold this technology under the premise that robots are more capable of decency than humans.

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Hello wonderful readers!

As summer reaches its peak beauty (and wildfire smoke), I’m offering a 75% discount on paid subscriptions to Chills. I can’t do this work without your support, and I’m humbly asking that you consider subscribing to support independent journalism that brings you insights into how we do what we do, and under-reported stories from around the world.

https://chills.substack.com/c5502383

Thank you for supporting independent journalism!

Best,

Lauren

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I sat down about a half an hour ago to write about the first story I ever published back when I was a new journalist. I generally get into a story by writing a descriptive scene — anything else tends to fall flat for me. Once I have my scene set, my writing tends to flow. But anecdotal ledes (also spelled “leads”) are just one way of getting into a piece in journalism. There are also news ledes, ledes that ask a question and a few others.

So when I began writing this piece, I didn’t paint a scene, and it felt dull. I got stuck. So I tried again. Then, I refined that until I was happy with it. The rest of the story started to flow from there.

But instead of continuing to write the piece, I realized that I could instead show you the process of self-editing I go through as a writer. Maybe it could be helpful to the writers out there, or to news consumers who wonder about the writing process — how do we make the journalism sausage? So here we go with my iterations. I’ve annotated below each draft of my thought process as I revised.

Draft 1:

The first story I ever published was during my first semester at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, 25 years ago. I’d come across a real story while doing a class assignment. A massive marble statue that used to sit at the triangular ship’s head of the Flatiron Building in downtown New York City had gone missing many years earlier; no one knew exactly when. Two cherubs flanking a shield. Somehow, no one knew where it had gone.

My class assignment had me interviewing an artist who’d been commissioned to create a reproduction of it. This…

Draft 2:

I was in a rundown studio in Long Island City back in the year 2000 during my first semester of journalism school. Plaster particles hung in the air as I stood with a short woman with a head of Medusa-style curls. In front of us stood a massive marble statue that used to sit at the triangular ship’s head of the Flatiron Building in downtown New York City had gone missing many years before; no one knew exactly when. Two cherubs flanking a shield. Somehow, no one knew where it had gone.

My class assignment had me interviewing an artist who’d been commissioned to create a reproduction of it. This…

Draft 3:

Plaster particles hung in the air in an open-plan studio in Long Island City as I stood with a short woman crowned in a head of Medusa curls. In front of us loomed a massive plaster statue of a shield flanked by two cherubs. It was bound for the top of the Flatiron Building in downtown Manhattan, where a similar statue had gone missing decades earlier — no one knew exactly when.

Reporting on the mystery of the disappeared sentinels would take me to the roof of the building — which was shaped like the bow of a boat — with its sweeping view of Madison Square Park, and to the office of the Flatiron’s manager, whose office sat in the creepy basement of the building. His walls were hung with posters of nude women, making me uncomfortable as he tried to intimidate me into giving up my sources thus far.

This was the first story I ever published, during my first semester at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, 25 years ago….

I hope this little exercise was helpful. Let me know if you want me to do more of these in the future. I’m obsessed with words and writing and always have been, so to have reached a point in life where I can recognize what makes my writing better is incredibly satisfying. I’d love to continue sharing my writing and reporting processes if you’d be interested.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

In the age of social media and instant communication, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing war through carefully curated military briefings and sanitized news reports. But rarely do we get such an unfiltered, visceral glimpse into the reality of modern warfare as the one provided by Ukrainian soldier Serhii Krynitskyi.

For nearly a year, Krynitskyi lived in a tiny, hand-dug underground bunker (or maybe a “grave,” as he put it) near Chasiv Yar, in eastern Ukraine, documenting his experience through raw video diaries filmed on his phone — sometimes charging it with batteries pulled from destroyed Russian drones. What emerged is perhaps one of the most intimate and harrowing accounts of frontline warfare I’ve ever seen.

“In the morning, you’re joking together, and by the evening, it’s the gates of heaven calling,” Krynitskyi told his camera after watching his last remaining companion bleed to death from shrapnel wounds. It was day 326 of his deployment.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t your grandfather’s war. Drone technology has fundamentally altered combat, creating an automated battlefield where reaching frontline positions has become a deadly obstacle course. Supply routes are littered with destroyed robotic vehicles, and both sides increasingly deploy armed ground robots instead of human soldiers for the most dangerous missions. This technological shift has forced armies to scatter small units across enormous territories rather than mass troops in traditional formations.

Krynitskyi’s story offers something rare in front-line reporting: an unmediated, first-person account of these new conditions. His video collection, reviewed by Reuters, shows a soldier documenting both the horror and bizarre normalcy of subterranean warfare.

The footage reveals how survival in even the bleakest of circumstances can become routine. We see Krynitskyi meticulously cataloguing cigarettes taken from fallen enemies, treating them like collectibles. We watch him display captured weapons with quiet pride. But we also witness his frantic efforts to save his dying friend, desperately applying medical aid that arrived too late.

What makes this account so compelling isn’t just its raw honesty — it’s how it captures warfare’s evolution. Traditional large-scale battles have given way to deadly games of cat-and-mouse. Enemy forces probe defenses every few days, sometimes approaching within yards before firefights erupt. Success is measured in meters, not miles.

The psychological impact is severe. Months after returning from the front, Krynitskyi still trembles and struggles with tears. “Many guys have gone out of their mind,” he told Reuters. The isolation and constant threat of death have left deep wounds that extend far beyond the physical battlefield.

Even so, remarkably, as Krynitskyi deals with what appears to be PTSD, he seems to have found meaning in his sacrifice.

After visiting several schools in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, to speak to children after his return, he told Reuters: “I realized there, in those schools, that it wasn’t in vain that I defended our land and these children — so they could study, see the clear sky.”

In an era of information warfare and competing narratives, Krynitskyi’s unvarnished video diary stands as something rare: authentic testimony from the ground level of a conflict that’s reshaping how wars are fought. His phone camera captured not just the mechanics of modern warfare, but its profound human cost — and the resilience of those who endure it.

In Tchomia, a town on the green-saturated shores of Lake Albert in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Rebecca ventured into the forest to find food for her children as war moved closer and markets became too dangerous. There, two men attacked and raped her “as if I was nothing,” she told The Washington Post in December 2025.

Remembering a health worker’s advice to seek immediate medical care, the injured Rebecca walked more than four miles to the Centre de Santé de Tchomia, a facility supported by USAID and the International Rescue Committee. But the clinic lacked the time-sensitive supplies to prevent HIV infection after sexual violence. Though nurses urged her to go to the hospital, Rebecca — hearing the rumbling of conflict nearby — feared leaving her children alone longer and returned home untreated.

Rebecca’s story illustrates a global crisis: Organizations meant to protect women in conflict zones are collapsing due to foreign aid cuts. This isn’t an abstract budget discussion — it’s the reality for survivors who reach clinics that can no longer help them.

The funding collapse stems primarily from the Trump administration’s massive cuts to U.S. foreign aid, compounded by reductions from other major Western donors including the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium, as governments redirect spending toward domestic priorities and defense. The administration’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion further compounds the damage to women and girls.

Organizations serving women in humanitarian crises — providing medical treatment after sexual violence, reproductive health care, legal assistance and psychosocial support — face particularly severe impacts. Many are reducing staff, suspending programs and narrowing their reach.

A new UN Women report describes organizations operating “beyond the breaking point” with widening gaps between those seeking help and available resources. Of 855 organizations surveyed, 40 percent receive less funding than in 2025, and 18 percent receive no direct funding at all. Nearly one-third reported reduced capacity to advocate for women’s rights, while one in five have paused or abandoned gender equality initiatives to preserve immediate services.

When international and local nonprofits that know how to reach women in remote areas with little health infrastructure lose funding, fewer places exist where women can seek safety and support.

“Every dollar withdrawn from women’s organizations is a dollar withdrawn from survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, displaced mothers, girls forced from school and communities struggling to survive,” Sofia Calltorp, U.N. Women Chief of Humanitarian Action, told Reuters.

The scale reflects a broader shift in priorities: while the world’s most vulnerable — often women and girls like Rebecca — are left to die, the U.S. government has decided it’s more important to fund initiatives ensuring men have adequate testosterone, among other attempts to center white men in every sphere, from family to the so-called Department of War.

A peer-reviewed Lancet study estimates that current U.S. aid cuts could contribute to more than 14 million preventable deaths worldwide through 2030, including 4.5 million children under five, while Boston University modeling suggests the first year has already contributed to roughly 780,000 deaths. Simply put, women like Rebecca no longer matter to the world’s superpower.

By January, the neighbors on Southeast 44th Place, a quiet cul-de-sac in Bellevue, Wash., were growing restless. Since the year began, they’d been calling 911, complaining about a rental house in Bellevue’s Lakemont neighborhood that had become, as referred to by the people who lived there, the “OnlyFans house.” Its parties were something out of an early 2000s teen movie and could be heard from blocks away as hundreds of attendees, many of them high schoolers, swarmed the home.

By the time the Bellevue PD recorded more than 100 complaints, they began to develop a theory that something beyond parties must be happening inside this Bellevue house. Last month, the theory led to a court date.

On June 8, 21-year-old Nikita Tyukalo was charged with human trafficking, money laundering and leading organized crime. The arrest was the result of a SWAT raid that uncovered, among other things, a McLaren, 300 cellphones and more than 50 laptops, according to charging documents filed in King County Superior Court. Prosecutors detail an abusive system of control concealed beneath a veneer of party mansions scattered across the Seattle area, luxury cars and adult content.

I started this piece as an investigation into a local crime. I was curious how someone around my age, from similar social circles, growing up just miles away from me ended up charged with running a multimillion-dollar sex-trafficking operation. What I found instead was a man deeply embedded in a lifestyle almost every teenager on the internet has seen — and which has quietly ensnared young women and girls into a sexualized trap that is entirely dependent on the rules set by men and boys.

Tyukalo’s Instagram page was predictable. Reposted clips of Andrew Tate ranking women’s attractiveness based on professions. Clips of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos talking about wealth and family. Dozens of posts featuring stacks of cash, fancy cars, steak dinners and models in bikinis. His followers posted the same things, luxury displayed under Instagram bios promising money: “From dead end jobs to financial freedom. “DM to get rich.” The bios advertise services, day-trading mentorship, Polymarket picks and, for men like Tyukalo, the management of OnlyFans girls.

To Soraya Chemaly, a journalist and author who writes about the dynamics of patriarchy and feminism — her latest book is All We Want Is Everything — the mechanics described in the charges are recognizable.

“Traffickers use the same mechanisms, the same psychological messaging and alienation from women’s humanity when they groom people,” she told me. The mechanisms she means are the manosphere’s, whose ideologies, she said, “basically are factories of dehumanization.”

Tyukalo told one alleged victim that he ran OnlyFans accounts “like an agency,” boasting that he had changed entire lives — by which he meant male lives — citing private jets and large paychecks as evidence. It is the same type of pitch that has built online fortunes in various arenas over the last decade. The promise is this: Proximity to a man with money is itself a form of opportunity; the relationship is the product.

“I think the elephant in the room is clearly Andrew Tate,” Chemaly said, naming the man who popularized the playbook. “What has happened is this normalization of misogyny, misogynistic abuse and sex trafficking.”

Tyukalo’s operation had a name and functioned under a kind of corporate structure. Two of the men involved had at different times run their own “management” companies before merging into a joint venture called Nova Talent Management. Nova recruited young women through direct messages on Snapchat by flashing advertising modeling work and a starting pay between $8,000 and $10,000 a month. One woman recalled being told the job would involve “bikini photos.” Another was promised a 70/30 split in her favor.

As the charges detail, none of these promises were kept. Women described being walked through account verification on OnlyFans, Chaturbate and other adult-content websites only to have passwords changed by the men running the operation almost immediately. From that point onward, several women said, they had no way of knowing how much money they were earning, let alone had access to the funds. The charges allege that the women were made to livestream sexually explicit content for 10 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

Chemaly resists the idea that walking through the recruitment door for these schemes requires naivety.

“Women, men, grow up in the systems we live in, and those systems are supremacist, they’re patriarchal,” she said.

For women without other avenues, modeling has always been a reasonable path. She points out that beauty pageants remain a leading source of educational scholarships for women in the United States.

“This correlation between modeling and sex trafficking, as we can tell from cases like the Epstein files, is a very strong and old one,” Chemaly said. “There’s really nothing new about that.”

What is new is the machinery: “You have the psychological grooming, you have the financial exploitation, you have the cultural messaging and you have the digital marketing tools that are available, and none of those could come together as powerfully as they can now.”

Chemaly calls the structure a “pincer strategy.” On one side, girls and women are groomed toward the supply. On the other, “there are just large parts of the internet where boys and men unfortunately have aggregated,” trading in “the kind of psychological dehumanization that enables them to treat trafficked women and girls and children not as human beings but as things that they can use and exploit and manipulate.”

The house parties in Lakemont were where the two sides of the pincer met, the audience and the recruits in the same room.

And now, while the operation is under indictment, the message remains. Men like Tyukalo do not need to win in court. They have already won the audience. When I started working on this piece, Tyukalo had a little under 5,000 Instagram followers. Today, he has 6,000. The indictment, it seems, has been good for business.

The account in its present state, it would seem, confirms this. The posts are gone. The cash, the cars, the sushi dinners, all deleted. A man facing $5 million dollars in bail, charged with human trafficking, money laundering and leading organized crime, has scrubbed his digital footprint clean. All the posts are wiped, except one.

What remains is a single Instagram story posted just a week ago: Tyukalo in an elevator, a woman facing him, her arms around his shoulders. His hand proprietarily gripping her behind.

Realizing that you are becoming the relic is a startling thing.

I’m sitting here making a “Cold War” playlist. So far, I’ve got U2, Toto, Men at Work, The Police, Genesis, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel and more — just starting on it. Getting myself in the mood-memory to write this. And there’s a reason I want to write this, more than just to reminisce about the nights spent crying under my covers as a child wondering if we’d go “flash-bang gone” that night without warning.

I’m writing this because dangerous language about communism has yet again surfaced in this country, mainly in the form of the right-wing interpretation of democratic socialism. On July 3, standing beneath the granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt on the eve of the country’s 250th birthday, Trump warned of a “resurgence of the communist menace in our land.”

“You can be a communist or you can be a patriot,” he declared. “You cannot be both.”

The next day, on July 4th, he kept at it: “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” followed by, “It’s like a cancer, you got to cut it out.” The threatening tone is typically Trumpian, although the messaging is new. Regardless, as the song says, everything old is new again.

I’ve spent much of my life trying to gather memories from my father, who was born in 1941 to older parents. His father fought in WWI, which is weird for my generation. But here I am, collating a “Cold War” playlist and feeling so many feelings — fears and sadnesses I haven’t felt in many years.

My elementary school had a fallout shelter in its basement marked by a nuclear symbol. We never used it, but it was there and reminded us that we were still under threat of a nuclear war from the Soviet Union at any moment. In the meantime, I spent my weekends watching documentaries about Hiroshima and the Holocaust. And yes, I was in elementary school, but this was the Sunday fare our local New York stations aired after the black-and-white reruns of “Abbott and Costello” and “Laurel and Hardy.”

Not that anyone I knew talked about any of it — minus Ronald Reagan, who loved invoking the “communist threat.”

I grew up in the not-so-distant past with the terror that the U.S.S.R. was going to annihilate us. There was “Rocky IV,” an entire installment devoted to the standoff. There was also the masterfully comedic movie with Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase, “Spies Like Us.” Anyone who grew up in the 1980s will remember the 1983 movie “The Day After” and the nightmares it left us with. Not to mention the ever-delightful doomsday film, a bedrock of my childhood, “WarGames” with Matthew Broderick.

And what a perverse revival this is: Coming from the mouth of Donald Trump, spreading fear of a communist takeover of the U.S. is absurdity at “Spies Like Us” levels, but with real-world stakes: Nuclear arsenals still exist — and so do white supremacists. Naming his opponents as a “communist menace” is simply a way to say they don’t belong in American life, and it’s painting a target on their backs.

Untangling the Cold War from the McCarthy-era Red Scare is hard enough. What we’re up against now makes little sense when you try to parse it.

Trump clearly is using the word “communism” as a pejorative for anyone liberal, drawing on the past, when lefty artists were dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer for their views and children cowered in their beds at night, ducking and covering. But imagine asking him or anyone on the right to actually define the word. They don’t know what it means; they just know it’s “bad.” They’re using it as a slur against anyone who leans left, anyone who wants free education, health care, etc.

The idea that wealth should be shared — that each person should be taken care of according to their level of need — is a bad, bad thing in capitalist America, and the right knows it and is right now looking to exploit it as the midterms near.

The question I have is: Do Americans under 40 even have the same associations us olds have with the word? Are they at all put off by the concept, or do they not associate it with capital “C” Communism — meaning the Soviet Communist Party?

I asked my 20-year-old intern what she thought of the word and whether her generation has any strong associations with it. She countered that their defining political fear words are “fascism” and “racism,” and that, no, “communism” has not been on their radar. And I asked my 85-year-old father what he thought. He’s the one who pointed out that as heavily as the fear was inculcated into the American public throughout his life, rarely has anyone who used that word in his past has understood what it meant. And hardly anyone in the present really cares anyway, he thinks.

“They don’t care about facts,” he said, referring to right-wingers who echo this Trump messaging. “It’s about what’s going to please the master.”

The younger the demographic in this country the more it leans left. And data show that younger generations now outnumber the older ones at the ballot box. So, with all due respect to the MAGAs and their new attempt to fearmonger, I’m not so sure it’s going to work. There’s a great quote from Coretta Scott King that seems apropos: “The failure to invest in youth reflects a lack of compassion and a colossal failure of common sense.”

In this case, investment means understanding your electorate. In utilizing the fear of “reds” to try to scare voters, I think the right is wandering lost somewhere out in left field.

“Disgusting, has-been harpy.” That’s how the United States government, on its own official website, describes “View” host Joy Behar. The word “harpy” says so much — an old mythological monster with the head and breast of a woman and the body of a bird. A creature associated with repulsion and greed. It is telling that the Trump administration reached for this particular epithet to describe a female commentator whose offense was simply doing her job.

Since November 2025, the White House has hosted a permanent government-run database that names individual journalists and media personalities by name and accuses them of bias, lying or what the site calls “left-wing lunacy.” The site organizes its targets into a rotating “Media Offender of the Week” and a permanent “Offender Hall of Shame,” searchable by six official categories: bias, lie, left-wing lunacy, omission of context, malpractice and conspiracy theories. A “bias tips” link invites the public to turn in reporting they dislike.

The media targets span nearly every major newsroom in the country from The Washington Post, The New York Times and even Fox News. The evidence cited against these organizations is often the government’s own. Rebuttals lean on Truth Social posts and RapidResponse47 tweets — RapidResponse47 is the official White House rapid response account on X, which exists to promote the administration and hold “Fake News accountable.” When the bias page cites RapidReponse47 as proof, the government is citing itself. It is a closed loop.

Press freedom organizations have taken notes. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Katherine Jacobsen said the page “creates a dangerous permission structure for attacks on journalists,” calling it “more in line with an authoritarian regime” than a democracy.

This is the first time in modern American history that a sitting administration has built an official platform dedicated to identifying and disparaging specific reporters by name, and the misogyny coating the posts against female reporters is an intentional mechanism of this administration. Call a female reporter out by name, label her a “harpy” and then let the internet do what the internet does. A way that we can gauge that this works is through a similar playbook run by the Mexican government next door for nearly a decade.

Under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who headed the government from 2018 to 2024, the Mexican government aired a weekly segment during his presidency called “Quién es quién en las mentiras” (“Who’s who in the lies”), which named outlets and reporters deemed dishonest. López Obrador’s harshest treatment, Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico correspondent, told me, was reserved for women. Strategically, the president rarely delivered direct blows himself.

“It wasn’t always López Obrador himself making the comments,” Hootsen said. “He’d single out journalists, especially women, knowing very well they’d be subjected to online harassment, including misogynistic comments, and he didn’t do anything to stop it, didn’t condemn it when it happened.”

The president simply highlighted a target and his online base did the rest. Some women backed away from reporting on the administration, others faced death threats. However, when asked to compare the two governments’ approaches, Hoosten volunteered, unprompted, that the American one is worse. The vulgarity and cruelty of the language used on the American site makes it stand apart from López Obrador’s approach.

Here is the part that should worry anyone who assumes this ends when Trump leaves office: Mexico’s oppression of journalists didn’t end with López Obrador’s term. The tool outlived the man who created it. When Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo became president in 2024, she inherited the segment and created her own version, “Detector de Mentiras” (“Lie Detector”). The new segment is notably different from López Obrador’s but maintains the same infrastructure.

“I think we can broadly say that the Sheinbaum administration has taken a significantly less confrontational approach in its interactions with the Mexican press, though some characteristics of the familiar [López Obrador]-esque polarization remain in place,” Hootsen said.

That is the trajectory a media-bias portal invites. A permanent instrument of the state that gets handed down and waits for the next occupant to pick it up. We tend to operate on the assumption that this ends when Trump leaves. Mexico suggests otherwise. Sheinbaum’s “Lie Detector” airs weekly.

AI models are trained on human content. And they have learned, with precision, exactly what we think of women. The results are pretty much what you might expect.

A UN Women report, released ahead of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva next month, documents what these systems have absorbed. Technologists have fed their AI models everything we’ve made — every image, headline, job listing, romance novel and HR manual, and watched them produce, at enormous scale and speed, a portrait of society that looks uncomfortably familiar.

A UNESCO study examining OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama found that the models associate words like “home,” “children” and “family” with women. For men, it’s “career,” “salary” and “business.” The logic extends from there into women’s bodies. AI has made it possible to generate fake, intimate images of real women using apps anyone can download on their smartphone. Deepfake pornography now makes up 98 percent of deepfake videos online and almost exclusively targets women.

A 2026 UN Women report examining online violence in the AI era found that around a quarter of women journalists, activists and human rights defenders surveyed had been diagnosed with anxiety or depression in connection with online abuse. Forty-one percent said they self-censor on social media to avoid the fallout. The report directly attributes these increasing statistics to AI, which has lowered the cost and technical barrier to creating nonconsensual imagery and producing targeted disinformation at scale.

“AI is making abuse easier and more damaging,” said Kalliopi Mingerou, UN Women’s chief of their Ending Violence Against Women Section, “and this is fueling the erosion of hard-won rights in a context marked by democratic backsliding and networked misogyny.”

And economic consequences are entangled with the misogyny. Female-dominated occupations are almost twice as likely to be replaced or automated by generative AI as male-dominated ones, reflecting women’s concentration in clerical, administrative and support roles — the jobs most vulnerable to automation. Meanwhile, women make up only 30 percent of the global AI-related workforce, meaning that the people least insulated from what AI is about to do to the economy are the people with the smallest hand in building it.

Only 24 of 138 countries even reference gender in their national AI strategy, according to UNESCO, and of those, only 18 include anything substantive. And right now, the United States is moving in an exclusionary direction.

A White House executive order signed in July 2025 bars federal agencies from procuring AI systems that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion,” which it defines as the most destructive form of ideological bias in AI. UN Women is calling for gender equality to be embedded at every stage of AI development, through safety in design standards and accountability frameworks.

Whether the Geneva forum produces anything binding to ensure that the future of AI is inclusive is another question. So is whether we can expect AI to change when our society is the one shaping it.

After writing my recent piece on Meta AI glasses, I found myself asking nearly all the women in my life about their experiences with the technology. I picked their brains to confirm what I had suspected. Nearly all my friends living in New York told a similar tale. They each had been approached on the street by a man wearing Meta glasses, asking a question vague enough to seem innocuous but strange enough to stop them for a moment. “Where’s your boyfriend?” “What’s your diet?” “Have we met before?”

For those unfamiliar: These glasses have a built-in camera that men have been using to film women without their knowledge. In some cases, the footage is then uploaded online for viewers’ consumption. In most places, this is entirely legal. Meta’s response to mounting scrutiny over how the glasses are being used has not been to limit their recording capabilities. It has been to hire Kylie Jenner.

In an age in which scrutiny from women against technology-facilitated gender-based violence is rising, companies like Apple and Google are assuming that women’s concerns can be bought off with celebrity endorsements and cuter designs. That any genuine worry will be lost to the endless drive of consumerism.

On Tuesday, Meta announced a new line of AI glasses sold under its own brand for the first time, a move that drops the Ray-Ban name in favor of three new frame styles. These new styles are distinctly more feminine with a rounder oval silhouette and a Meta AI assistant programmed to speak in Kylie Jenner’s voice. The metal nose bridge is designed specifically so makeup wipes off more easily, a detail apparently added after Meta’s conversations with Jenner.

Could they be more obvious?

The move is a transparent bid for female consumers. Meta’s distinctive Ray-Ban glasses have acquired an unflattering public image, largely shaped by the men wearing them. A Kylie Jenner collab is an attempt to rebrand this image. But while notable, it’s not a privacy fix. The new glasses carry the same core features as the original, including hands-free photography and video capture. The same recording light remains and the workarounds to disable it are the exact same.

When Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth was asked about privacy concerns at a press conference this week, he reached for a historical analogy to explain away the controversy. “I’m old enough to remember when there was controversy about phones having cameras,” he said. “So, there is this social learning thing that has to happen.”

The women I spoke to are already learning, just not perhaps what Bosworth had in mind.

In 2025, Meta sold seven million pairs of its AI smart glasses. They were designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban and look exactly like the iconic Hollywood frames — except one detail sets them apart, a detail small enough to be missed by the average passerby. The usual little, silver rivet on the corner of the frame has been replaced by a tiny camera, activated by a single touch and capable of capturing 3K resolution and up to eight hours of footage on a single charge.

The camera includes what is marketed as a safety privacy feature: an LED light that flashes when the recording is active. However, a quick Google search reveals several tutorials on how to disable the blinking light, and a single piece of electrical tape can easily conceal it.

Meta markets these glasses as a hands-free companion that can effortlessly capture life as you live it. But there is a problem baked into the fact that the glasses work exactly as advertised.

There is already a cost to living in a world where anyone with a phone might be recording us. These glasses remove the only reassurance that remained — the visibility of the camera. You can see a phone but you cannot always see a tiny blinking light hidden within a glasses frame. The results are threatening, if not harmful, to women.

In January, after a night out in Vancouver, Canada, Kassy Zanjani was approached by a man in a fast-food restaurant. The man told her she was gorgeous, to which she responded that she had a boyfriend and the man walked away. Zanjani didn’t think much of the interaction until a week later, when a friend sent her a video of the entire exchange on Instagram. Zanjani told the U.K. Independent she believed the man was targeting intoxicated women who would be more vulnerable to being filmed for social media content.

Zanjani’s experience is part of a larger trend. In February 2025, on a beach in Sydney, Australia, a British woman named Millie was approached by a man who aggressively asked for her number. She felt uncomfortable and didn’t know how to get him to leave. She didn’t realize she was being filmed until a friend of hers in the U.K. sent her a TikTok of the conversation. By that point, the video had surpassed a million views.

“I felt absolutely embarrassed, distraught, upset, crying,” she told the Independent.

Another woman, named Oonagh, was sunbathing in Brighton, England, last June when a man approached and asked her out. When she later tried to report the viral video that came from the exchange, the local Sussex police told her there was nothing they could do. In most countries, the U.S. and U.K. included, it is legal to film people in public without their consent — but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable.

Another disturbing element to this story is that the men behind these lenses are often profiting from their videos. Entire accounts have emerged that are dedicated to this format: A man approaches a woman in public; the woman, unaware she is being recorded, responds as many people might — warmly, awkwardly or maybe even with a little irritation; the footage is then uploaded to a platform that attracts thousands of views from an audience that is overwhelmingly young and male who find the whole endeavor entertaining, or worse, pornographic. The content is then monetized and the woman is not compensated.

While researching this piece, I spent hours watching examples of this content and found a couple alarming trends within the comment sections. Hundreds of strangers are rating the woman’s appearance and speculating about her sexual abilities. I came across demeaning sexual comments like, “Did you clap them cheeks, bro?” and “Just rubbed one out.”

Viewers also have become dedicated to finding the women filmed, filling the comment sections with desperate pleas. “Please, does anyone know who this girl is?” one commenter wrote. Other men were answering, writing that they had uploaded the woman’s face to a facial recognition tool called TryFaceFind, which claims to match a photograph against Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat within seconds, and posting the results publicly in the thread.

The filming is the first act of violation, the identification is the second. Whatever comes next is left to the imagination of whoever is reading.

As Rebecca Hitchen of the U.K.-based nonprofit End Violence Against Women Coalition told BBC, this digital exploitation is “sadly, very predictable.” Advocates for women’s safety have been predicting the covert surveillance of women through new technology for years with increasing urgency. And it may only get worse as Meta plans to integrate facial recognition capabilities into future versions of the glasses.

The ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, have warned that this technology would hand abusers, stalkers and even government officials the means of stripping people’s ability to move anonymously through public space. Domestic abuse organizations have called it a direct threat to survivors — the concern is that facial recognition could prevent survivors from being able to anonymously flee to new locations to rebuild their lives.

Wearable technology has become an increasingly common tool of abuse and control. Both Refuge and Women’s AID, two U.K.-based nonprofits, told The Independent that the “tragic reality” is that abusers would use such tools for “nefarious” purposes. Refuge reported a 62 percent increase in referrals to its technology-facilitated abuse team in 2025 alone.

In the end, beyond the harm being perpetrated against women, the men watching these videos are learning something damaging. They are learning that a woman’s reaction, however confused, uncomfortable, polite or angry it may be, is there to amuse them. That her presence in public is, by default, available for their entertainment and sexual gratification.

Meta’s response when pressed on the matter of women being filmed without their consent? Users are responsible for following the law. And the law, as noted, says that this is fine.

If you haven’t been following the drama over at CBS, you should. Because its program, “60 Minutes” has long represented some of the best journalism in the U.S. and is currently being eviscerated for political reasons. And not “insider politics” reasons — actual American politics reasons, aka the network is quite clearly seeking favor from the Trump administration, marking a sad departure from journalism ethics at a mainstay of the legacy press.

With the sudden firing of longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley, a war of words has been kicked off, and they are worth reading. In response to a letter from newly appointed executive producer Nick Bilton explaining why Pelley was fired for “cause,” Pelley gave The Washington Post his powerful reply.

From the letter:

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

To read both Bilton’s and Pelley’s letters in the Post, here is a gift article.

There is a heavy belief in witchcraft in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I even had a foreigner — a Swedish doctor — tell me that in her years of living there, she’d seen too many things she just couldn’t explain unless it was sorcery.

I learned a fair amount about local suspicion of black magic while on my reporting trips there. As I interviewed people about the extreme number of child abductions and rapes in a village called Kavumu, near the eastern city of Bukavu, I was told that there was a magic powder being sprinkled on houses (that were really shacks without doors) at night in order to keep everyone asleep while men abducted little girls.

This may have been true.

In the years since the men were convicted, I don’t believe anyone has determined whether there was a real powder being used, but it was proven at trial that a local witch doctor had advised the men to rape the girls because their virgin blood would make the men “impervious to bullets.”

So when I read this story about Ebola in DRC in The Washington Post today, much of the suspicion and skepticism made sense to me.

When you live in a culture where unseen powers can inflict suffering, the idea that outsiders with syringes might be deliberately spreading disease doesn’t sound paranoid — it sounds entirely plausible.

The ongoing Ebola outbreak in DRC has become far more than a public health crisis. It represents a devastating breakdown of trust that is actively hampering disease control efforts. This mistrust is manifesting in violent attacks on health care facilities, with communities believing medical workers are deliberately spreading the disease rather than treating it.

The roots of this suspicion run more deeply than a simple belief in black magic and ill will. Congo has endured decades of exploitation by foreign powers seeking to extract valuable minerals like cobalt, essential for modern technology. This historical context has sown fertile ground for conspiracy theories when international organizations suddenly mobilize resources to combat Ebola — while ignoring other dire health needs.

Funding patterns have inadvertently validated these suspicions. Western nations have dramatically reduced support for general health care and development programs across the region. Save the Children, the Post reports, can now finance only one-third of the 96 health clinics it previously supported. And when Ebola appears — yet again — significant international money flows in specifically for the response to the outbreak.

As Rose F. Tchwenko from Mercy Corps explained in the Post, this disparity sends a troubling message: “Now people will see that the money only comes when it is about our agenda — about not wanting Ebola to come to us.” Communities interpret this as evidence that Western countries care only about diseases that might spread to them, not about Congo’s significant daily health struggles with malaria, measles or malnutrition.

The human consequences are severe. Beyond a 50 percent chance of death, Ebola survivors face permanent social ostracism — losing jobs, being abandoned by families and experiencing ongoing stigma. Adam Vainqueur, who survived Ebola in 2018, told the Post how “People fear you, your family chase you away or avoid you, at the market, people run away when they see you.” This stigma can be fatal when it prevents people from seeking treatment.

Operational challenges compound the problem. Delays in diagnostic testing and gaps between official accounts and community observations fuel further distrust. Rumors circulate that doctors are “giving people Ebola with injections,” while families refuse to believe loved ones have contracted the disease.

Unfortunately, some communities have developed theories that nonprofit organizations deliberately bring Ebola to justify their presence and secure funding. In Goma, cynical residents tell aid workers: “There’s no epidemic, and it’s just NGOs trying to get money.”

The crisis extends beyond local communities to international relations. The Trump administration’s dismantling of pandemic response capabilities has made the United States an unreliable partner in global health emergencies, complicating coordination efforts.

Health care workers like Greg Ramm with Save the Children warn of long-term consequences.

“After this is over — because this will end — the spotlight goes away, the journalists go away, and the surge of aid goes away,” he said. “And children will return to dying of malnutrition and measles and malaria because the world will have stopped caring.”

Read the full Washington Post story here.

I don’t often write about domestic issues, but when two global nonprofits decide to speak out on something that will affect up to 10 million Americans, I’m here for it. That is the number of people who face losing health coverage by 2028 in what critics call a “bureaucratic catastrophe” targeting vulnerable populations.

Human Rights Watch and Oxfam America warn that recent federal legislation (the moronically named 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act) will require most low-income childless adults to prove 80-plus hours monthly of employment, schooling or job training to maintain Medicaid benefits starting in 2026. The policy targets a population where over 60 percent already hold jobs but lack access to workplace health plans due to low wages.

Georgia’s pilot program has already demonstrated the harsh consequences. An Atlanta grocery store employee worked throughout her pregnancy but was cut off from coverage after she had her baby — when bureaucrats incorrectly determined she had concealed her job status. She now faces overwhelming hospital bills while spending months attempting to regain benefits through an unresponsive system.

“It’s hectic,” she said. “You’re not able to reach anybody.”

A second woman lost nutrition assistance despite correctly filing volunteer hours through official channels. She chose to purchase costly private coverage rather than battle the malfunctioning bureaucracy.

“What they fail to realize is that a lot of people working still need assistance,” she said.

Simultaneously, the same law provides substantial tax relief for America’s wealthiest — the top 0.1 percent will pocket an average $311,000 annually in 2027 while low-income households see their tax burden increase.

“These work requirements address a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Human Rights Watch researcher Matt McConnell.

Advocacy organizations are mobilizing before a June 1 federal deadline to block this foreseeable, heartless crisis.

In other crap news, the Taliban has decreed “the conditions for separation from a spouse, raising serious concerns around child marriage and women’s consent,” reports UN Women.

“Decree no. 18 sets no minimum age of marriage. Instead, it outlines how a child marriage can be invalidated, or a child who was forced to marry could seek an annulment, after they reach puberty. By implying that child marriage is permitted, it risks normalizing the practice.”

Onward we go, even if not upward.

When people started dying from Ebola in West Africa in 2014, Martha Anker, a former WHO statistician in communicable disease surveillance, had a gut feeling: that Ebola would claim women as its primary victims, just as it had in the past.

Sitting in her Massachusetts home watching the news unfold, Anker was proven tragically right.

By August 2014, The Washington Post reported that women comprised 55 to 60 percent of Ebola deaths across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In Liberia specifically, that figure reached 75 percent.

“I felt very sad when I read that,” Anker told me at the time. “I’m so sorry to be right.”

Her prescience wasn’t luck — it was expertise. Back in 2007, Anker had written in a WHO report: “Differences in exposure between males and females have been shown to be important factors in transmission of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. Therefore, it is important to understand the gender roles and responsibilities that affect exposure in the local area.”

That warning clearly hadn’t reached West Africa when the 2014 outbreak began. Ebola spreads through contact with blood and bodily fluids, and across the affected regions, women serve as primary caregivers. They remain in homes, becoming infected by children or husbands rather than seeking professional medical care. Rarely are the roles reversed.

“If a man is sick, the woman can easily bathe him but the man cannot do so,” said Marpue Spear, executive director of the Women’s NGO Secretariat of Liberia. “Traditionally, women will take care of the men as compared to them taking care of the women.”

It shouldn’t take more than 1,200 deaths (which was the count at the time I wrote this story for Foreign Policy) to recognize how gender dynamics might save lives —through targeted messaging about protective measures or encouraging professional care over home treatment. There shouldn’t need to be Cassandras like Anker warning about preventable patterns.

We face another Ebola crisis now in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, featuring a particularly frightening strain of the disease with no cure or treatment. People are dying at alarming rates in a conflict zone filled with refugee camps, where accessing limited health care proves extremely difficult. Reduced international support compounds these challenges. (See: The Trump administration’s decimation of USAID.)

While infection numbers currently remain unclear — the disease has spread undetected for weeks — no data yet exists on gender breakdown of victims. But if a gender lens had already been applied to Ebola response, we could have addressed obvious disparities: women’s limited access to medication and finances for treatment, their disproportionate caregiving roles, and systemic inequalities that determine who lives and dies.

“Looking at who dies in an outbreak shows you who has power and who doesn’t,” said Columbia University epidemiology professor Wafaa El-Sadr. “In a way, it holds a mirror to society and shows how we treat each other.”

When women become primary epidemic victims, few recognize this reality, ask why, or build responses accordingly. Experts say too little is being done to translate existing knowledge about gender differences in infectious diseases into practice, such as determining how understanding gender roles might inform containment strategies before outbreaks occur.

Worse, insufficient research explores how infectious diseases affect sexes differently on biological levels. It’s Groundhog Day with each disease surge, costing lives unnecessarily.

“We can’t get past the ‘interesting observation’ stage,” Johns Hopkins professor Sabra Klein said in 2014. While public health officials gather age and sex data during crises, “nobody goes somewhere with it.”

Each new outbreak presents an opportunity to act differently. With deaths mounting in Central Africa, there’s still a chance to incorporate a much-needed gender lens into medical and social responses.

As El-Sadr put it simply 12 years ago: “Maybe the lessons learned can help prevent the next epidemic.”

The time to apply those lessons is now — just as it was during the last crisis we failed to learn from.

What’s the longest flight you’ve ever taken? I’m not sure I’ve ever been on a flight longer than 10 or 11 hours (which were part of longer trips to the Middle East or Central Africa), although I’ve been on seemingly endless trips that have taken me maybe 24 hours total, including layovers of four-plus hours. So, this morning, when I read what I’m about to tell you about, I felt sick.

It was a line in a new report about U.S. deportation flights that blared off the page: “a single ICE Air flight conducted deportation stops in Poland, Moldova, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Georgia — which lasted a grueling 51 hours while individuals onboard remained physically restrained for the entire journey, including layovers and fuel stops.”

In a time of increased inhumanity among our fellow humans, of the constant erosion of human rights, of the loss of empathy, being tied to a small airplane seat for more than two days while being flown to a country you’ve likely never been to, perhaps leaving behind beloved family — soon to be thousands of miles away — especially when you came to the U.S. in hopes of a better life than you had, feels particularly cruel. Consider the basic human needs denied during this time: adequate food, bathroom access, the ability to stretch or move freely, medical care if needed.

To pull back, the line is from a Human Rights First report and is part of their ICE Flight Monitor project, which I wrote about here. The monitor uses aviation data to track and document ICE flights, including deportation flights and domestic transfers between U.S. detention centers and deportation staging facilities.

Fifty-one hours.

The report describes the flight almost clinically, as one entry among hundreds of deportation and transfer flights tracked last month. But, at least for me, the detail changes the scale of what I think of when I hear the word “deportation.” This was not a quick removal flight across a border. It was an odyssey through six countries and multiple time zones that cost taxpayers somewhere between roughly $430,000 and more than $1.3 million — depending on the aircraft and security classification used for the mission — while subjecting human beings to conditions that would constitute torture in other contexts. ICE itself says deportation charters average about $8,577 per flight hour, while “special high-risk” missions can cost as much as $26,795 per hour.

The route itself is disorienting: Poland to Moldova to Armenia to Uzbekistan to Pakistan to Georgia. It sounds less like civilian immigration enforcement than a military reconnaissance mission.

The report says April marked the highest level of ICE Air activity since the monitoring project began in 2020. Researchers tracked 1,751 immigration enforcement flights in a single month, including 245 deportation flights to 38 countries. But the 51-hour flight stands out because it reveals something more visceral than scale: duration — and endurance.

Immigration detention is often discussed in numbers — arrests, removals, quotas and bed counts. The endless uncertainty that a person in ICE detention in the U.S. endures is unquantifiable, and sometimes unbearable, whether on a deportation flight or in a cell in the mosquito-infested “Alligator Alcatraz” or in a sweltering cage in a Texas border town. Watching, waiting, hoping, wondering. Afraid, unsure, heartbroken, sick.

Imagine being shackled long enough to watch two sunrises from a plane window. Long enough to sleep, wake up and sleep again and still not know where you are ultimately being taken. Long enough that airport stops begin to blur together into a geography of transit lounges, armed escorts and refueling crews.

The report also says that ICE increasingly uses “third-country removals,” sending people to nations they are not from. Researchers documented deportations involving Uganda, Paraguay, Moldova and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others. In some cases, migrants reportedly have had no connection to the countries where they were sent.

But the 51-hour flight crystallizes the broader transformation more effectively than any policy language can. Deportation is no longer just a border process. Instead, it has become a kind of long-haul transportation infrastructure.

And somewhere inside that infrastructure, people are spending more than two days restrained and confused, unaware of their futures, under physical duress, on planes crossing the globe.

They are promised work. Some men believe they are traveling to Russia for civilian jobs. Others think they’ve signed up for military support roles far from the battlefield. Many arrive believing they will not be required to fight in Ukraine at all.

But a recent investigation by human rights groups Truth Hounds, FIDH and the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, found that instead, “within weeks of signing their contracts, they are sent to the front lines and assigned to extremely dangerous combat missions, with a high probability of death or serious injury.”

Foreign recruits are mainly assigned to “meat assaults” — a term that evokes exactly what it sounds like: human beings used as expendable bodies to absorb artillery fire, expose Ukrainian positions and exhaust defenses through sheer attrition. People are used as consumable material.

A Global Assembly Line of Bodies

The numbers are overwhelming. Open-source intelligence indicates that more than 10,000 recruits from Central Asia, approximately 1,800 from South Asia, between 1,700 and 4,000 from Africa, and an estimated 1,000 to 8,000 from Latin America have enlisted in the Russian Armed Forces — with actual totals believed by analysts to be significantly higher. Ukrainian authorities say recruits have come from more than 130 countries.

Foreign fighter numbers have surged by more than 30 percent between September 2025 and February 2026, and Ukrainian intelligence “has identified plans to recruit an additional 18,500 foreign nationals by the end of 2026.” North Korea alone has sent about 14,000 fighters to the front in an agreement with Russia.

This worldwide recruitment isn’t accidental. Russia has transformed its approach following the launch of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Initially, recruitment focused on “ideologically motivated volunteers” with prior military experience. Now it operates as “a globalized system targeting socio-economically and legally vulnerable populations” spanning dozens of countries, the groups write.

The Machinery of Deception

The men being drawn into the war are no longer ideologues or seasoned mercenaries. They’re undocumented migrants, debt-burdened students, day laborers, inmates — people with minimal comprehension of what they’ve actually committed to.

“Many potential fighters have been lured through misleading representations, such as promises of civilian employment in Russia, non-combat military roles or facilitated access to Europe,” the investigators write. Contracts are presented in Russian to men who can’t read the language, “often without any explanation and in circumstances that [make] refusal impossible.”

No one can argue, for instance, that the North Korean recruits have given consent to fight when being shuffled from the control of a slave state to that of a warmongering oligarchy.

And for some, returning home means prosecution. The groups found that countries like Kenya and Kazakhstan have been legally pursuing these men.

There’s something chilling about the administrative ordinariness of the fraud. It’s not dramatic abduction or the kinds of scenarios people associate with human trafficking. Instead, it’s paperwork that makes lies sound credible, and that dooms men to death.

From Promises to Trenches

Most foreign recruits the investigators interviewed have been deployed to combat zones within weeks of signing. They reach the front lines after just this short period of basic training.

The accounts detail increasing control tactics: seized identity documents, manufactured criminal accusations, violence that reaches the level of torture. Some face intimidation and persecution during deployment. Some become ensnared by financial obligations, monitoring, communication barriers or the virtual impossibility of flight once incorporated within a foreign military apparatus during active conflict.

Reframing the Story

The investigation’s most unsettling claim isn’t simply that violations have occurred, but that our perception of the men fighting Russia’s war may be completely mistaken. The term “mercenary” suggests someone consciously trading violence for payment. But researchers contend that many recruits may actually meet the criteria for human trafficking under international law — that they were recruited and transferred through deception or coercion for the purpose of deploying them as expendable personnel on the most dangerous missions.

That difference reshapes the war’s entire narrative. The mercenary figure is calculating, opportunistic, ethically disconnected. The trafficking victim is exposed, deceived, trapped by circumstances. The investigation doesn’t assert that every foreign fighter fits the latter description, but it does maintain that a lot of examples exist in a moral and legal ambiguity far more troubling than the oversimplified notion of volunteers enthusiastically joining a remote conflict.

Contemporary trafficking accounts mainly focus on forced labor, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude. This investigation suggests another scenario: that modern-day exploitation can end not in a sweatshop or a brothel, but in a foxhole.

The Arithmetic of Disposability

What the foreign men being drawn into Russia’s war are left with isn’t ideology but rather bewilderment. These are men who sign documents they can’t read, who believe they are construction workers until handed rifles, who realize only after it is too late that the border they have crossed might never let them return.

The investigators cite reports suggesting that as many as one in five foreign recruits do not survive. Even that statistic feels secondary beside the other horror embedded throughout: the possibility that some of the dead will never have fully understood what they had been recruited into at all.