Mark Seal is very fond of the phrase “Who Ya Gonna Call? Scam Busters!”—he uses it three times in this piece. Yet it’s still refreshing, despite being from last year, to read a story that focuses on the painstaking effort to trace scammers rather than lingering on the victim’s humiliation (looking at you, Netflix). Seal does explain how a French woman named Anne fell for “Brad Pitt” online and subsequently lost her fortune to the scammers, but her supposed savior, cyber‑detective Marwan Ouarab—sporting a cat‑in‑a‑trench‑coat T‑shirt—gets most of the page time here. Ouarab apparently found the scammers within 48 hours, but no charges have been made, and Anne is still fighting to recover any of her money. You can call the scam busters, but you’re still in for a long wait.

“All during the scam, Anne was suspecting something,” he says over a vanilla flan, a sweet treat for a very determined guy. “But every time, the crooks had fine words, the right words. They were really poetic. They knew what words were right for her. They really understood Anne’s psychological profile.”

It was a classic “sentimental scam,” says Ouarab—a carefully produced, all-encompassing “theatrical event” that uses love as the bait to hook the target and then envelops them completely in the con. (In this case, the divorced interior designer, Anne, whose last name has not been made public, and a convincing facsimile of Brad Pitt, achieved via A.I., deepfake technology, and, according to Ouarab, “ridiculous photoshop tools to create pictures of the fake Brad in his hospital bed.”)

Daniel left school five years ago and still lives with his parents—pretty normal in a country where around a third of young British men haven’t moved out. What is different about Daniel is his identification as “hikikomori”—literally “pulled inward”—a form of extreme social isolation. Since leaving school, he has left his family home “maybe once a month.” Research into hikikomori is limited, though some links with social anxiety and autism have been drawn. In this piece, Eve Livingston explores what day-to-day life is actually like for the families living with this phenomenon, doggedly seeking access to a world built to avoid in‑person encounters.

Dip your toe into the world of hikikomori, and you’ll find that attitudes vary widely, even among the self-identified. Some, like Daniel, display a level of sensitivity and sometimes defensiveness about their lifestyle, while others are more open about a sense of sadness and sometimes hopelessness they felt towards their circumstances. 

“I am [a hikikomori]… it sucks and I hate my life,” reads one such comment on Reddit. “Every single attempt at recovery has ended up in an even deeper relapse and its [sic] so painfully boring and lonely… I fantasise about being free all the time but I know I’m probably just going to die this way.”

Linni Kral has always been preoccupied with her bowels, but as a food writer, it hasn’t usually been that end she’s focused on in her writing. Now, as the internet explodes with “scat chat,” Kral is ready to investigate whether obsessing over our bowel movements has any merit. The result is a giggle fest—though you’ll need the stomach for some serious poo talk.

One day, it seems, the internet woke up and chose BMs, and suddenly the hottest girl you know is posting about scat. Now you have to go out of your way to not eat fiber—prebiotic supplements are in our soda, our candy bars, our cold foam. The beverage case is dominated by the likes of Olipop and Poppi and Culture Pop, all offering varying degrees of digestive assistance. The other day, I saw a smoothie blend in the freezer aisle called “Fiber Supremacy,” and earlier this year, Frito-Lay launched a fiber-packed version of both SunChips and Smartfood popcorn. Kraft is making a purgative macaroni and cheese that boasts six grams of fiber per serving (or 15 grams if you eat the whole box—which is, let’s be honest, how most people consume Easy Mac). Outside the retail space, home cooks are finding ways to fit chia and flax into not just their breakfasts but their meat loaf. They’re pureeing beans into sauces and veggies into puddings and cakes. Literal doctors are posting their #fibermaxxing menus to TikTok. And while this may sound like just another wave on the ocean of content we surf daily, it gets…weirder.

When we think of the ancient world, Greece and Rome usually come to mind, with perhaps a smattering of Cleopatra and Egypt thrown in. This is true not only for the general public but for scholars too, who have tended to keep a narrow focus on these cultures. But, as Carlos Noreña reports, we are on the brink of an exciting shift that explores the patterns of connectivity and exchange that shaped a truly global ancient world. After all, when eighth‑century Central Asian silver vessels turn up in an archaeological dig in Scotland, you have to broaden your view.

The physical geography of temperate Afro-Eurasia, then, enabled a particular configuration of long-distance connectivities. But how extensively and how deeply was this transcontinental region interconnected in antiquity? Should we see ancient Afro-Eurasia as an integrated ‘world system’? We can reconstruct the broad contours of such a system in the Middle Ages, from the middle of the first to the middle of the 2nd millennium CE. This was the world brilliantly brought to light, and to much fanfare, in the recent ‘Silk Roads’ exhibit at the British Museum in London. What made the show so remarkable was quite simply the assemblage, in a single space, of a wide assortment of premodern objects that had travelled over vast distances before settling in far-flung locales. A humble, 6th-century glass bowl from Iran was found in Nara, Japan. From a shipwreck near Sumatra in Indonesia, divers recovered a 9th-century turquoise-glazed ceramic amphora from West Asia. There were luxury goods on display, too, including a spectacular 7th-century golden necklace found in the eastern Mediterranean with lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and rock crystal from Madagascar, and a remarkable set of 8th-century ivory chess pieces from South Asia discovered in Samarkand in Uzbekistan. These long-distance connections reached into the far west of Eurasia, too, as revealed by the fragments of a 10th-century Chinese silk tunic found in Sweden, or the 8th-century Central Asian silver vessels that made their way to Scotland.