Seven versions of Drag Race and 14 Emmy Awards later, RuPaul Charles has gone from club kid to media mogul—and whether in or out of drag, is utterly comfortable in his own skin. Whether he’s comfortable being profiled is another issue, but that doesn’t stop Ronan Farrow from turning in a nuanced, knowing piece about a man who’s bigger than any box.
A few days later, RuPaul woke up and performed his morning ritual. First, he stretched. “I’m older,” he said. “I have to make sure everything is doing the thing.” Then he prayed, saying aloud the words “Dear God, thank you,” followed by things for which he is grateful. That week, the list included the roof over his head, his access to running water, and Georges, his husband, whom he met while dancing at Limelight, in New York, in the nineties. After that, he meditated, a practice that can last anywhere from forty-five seconds to fifteen minutes. He lets the ideas drift through: “Oh, there’s my father. Oh, there’s Judy Garland.” His demons are there, too, but he claims to have befriended them. He put on another black hoodie and another pair of black workout pants and walked ten minutes to the nearest Marks & Spencer to pick up an apple turnover.
Soon afterward, we sat in the living room of his rental cottage, a modest, two-story structure with neutral walls and a tiny kitchenette to which he had added, as far as I could tell, nothing but a row of identical boxes of berry-flavored Special K. “I brought this in,” he said, pointing to an LCD monitor that sat, with his laptop, on an otherwise empty white desk. “And I moved this chair. That’s about it.” Yet he was crazy about the place—he liked the flow of the floor plan, and took pictures of it, to try to replicate it in Wyoming.
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A good scammer sees opportunity everywhere, including their own downfall. In 2006, the police showed up at Gustav Daphne’s house in Beverly Hills. They had come once before, when a neighbor complained about his trash. Daphne happened to be swimming in his pool at the time, and because he is French, he came to the front door in a tiny little bathing suit. The police were appalled; they gave him a reprimand about storing his garbage more tidily and scurried away.
This time was different. The cops came straight into the house. There were a dozen of them, wearing bulletproof vests. They took him outside in handcuffs and put him in a car. Maybe he was paranoid, having built a multimillion-dollar empire on fraud and deceit, nurturing connections with international criminal rings, but at first he thought that he was being kidnapped. When he saw the jail, he was relieved.
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The feeling was short-lived. The jail was cleaner than those in Europe where he’d been held, but after a couple of hours he demanded a cigarette and was informed that smoking was prohibited. OK, he thought. There must be a way. There’s always a way. He would find the right people, negotiate the right conditions. He had to smoke! He loved to smoke. He loved it more than anything, except for women. He loved women! And smoking, and art, and shopping.
He found someone in the prison whom everyone called El Gordo, a Mexican guy who could hook people up with anything. Daphne asked for cigarettes and was given an address on the outside where he would need to have $300 delivered. This was not a problem. He didn’t crave money, but it was useful, so he accrued it. His mansion had once belonged to a silent film star; he sometimes commuted by helicopter. There wasn’t much Daphne couldn’t afford.
After Daphne’s cousin drove a Bentley to a shady neighborhood and made the cash drop on his behalf, Daphne went back to El Gordo to collect his cigarettes. El Gordo looked at him, then gave him a nicotine patch. “No smoking in prison,” El Gordo said.
By the time Daphne was extradited to Europe to face money laundering charges, which was the reason he’d been arrested in the first place, he had kicked his cigarette habit. He felt great. He was buoyant with health. He boarded a plane to Switzerland in handcuffs, was whisked to a prison near the Alps, and was put in a cell. Waiting for him there was a pouch of tobacco. He resisted for a few hours. Then he smoked the whole thing.
Eventually, Daphne was sent to a prison in France, where he could get anything he wanted: magazines, special meals, the Israeli cigarettes he preferred. His lawyer could also bring him things. So when he saw a segment on TV about climate change policy, he asked his lawyer to bring him more information about France’s plans to reduce emissions. Daphne had a preternatural ability to sniff out criminal prospects, and he’d caught a familiar whiff.
When Daphne read the materials his lawyer provided him, he learned about Europe’s carbon-emissions trading system, the first of its kind in the world. It had grown out of the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark international agreement to reduce global emissions. Sure enough, Daphne told me, he saw the blueprint for what would become his next illicit enterprise. As soon as he’d finished his time in prison, he began gaming the new emissions-trading system.
The scam would help Daphne accrue even more money, and it would make him famous. In the media he cut a dashing figure, partying with celebrities and oligarchs. He maintained his slim physique by avoiding carbohydrates like they were venom and dressed in blazers cut from blue velvet or embroidered with shimmering brocade flowers. He liked to wear a diamond-encrusted Chopard sun pendant on his partially bared chest and was rarely photographed without one of his hundreds of pairs of Tom Ford sunglasses, all aviator-style with gradient lenses. Always, it seemed, he had a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth.
Reporters dubbed Daphne the “prince of carbon,” but it wasn’t just his flamboyant charisma that elevated him to criminal royalty. So did the nature of his new fraud. Daphne was scamming the fight against climate change by exploiting a policy flaw that left billions for the taking.
No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.
No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.
Ishould say here that Gustav Daphne is a pseudonym. He remains a wanted man in France, so when I traveled to meet with him at his gated villa in Tel Aviv, he agreed to speak on the condition that I not use his name—any of his names. (He has a few aliases.) He kept saying what a bad idea it was to talk to me. He had turned over a new leaf, he insisted, and like a freshly avowed ascetic, he nurtured a few simple pleasures: taking his impeccably trained Belgian Malinois on sunset walks along the beach; going horseback riding with his daughters. He tried to steer clear of trouble, though it occasionally sought him out. A few weeks before we met, some masked guys on a motorcycle drove by firing guns at his home; when I visited, the front door was being replaced.
Still, his name is all over the French media. I warned him that, at least in some circles, a pseudonym would be a pretty weak shield for his identity. That was OK with him. He said that he wanted to put the past behind him and focus on his new ventures, like crypto investing. So, no name.
During my visit, Daphne took calls from his lawyers and asked favors of his wife and flirted with acquaintances over WhatsApp. He wore his Tom Ford sunglasses indoors and out. He showed me his art: a large Kandinsky painting in the foyer, a few Chagalls downstairs. The villa had some burly guys on staff and a cleaner from Sri Lanka who picked up after two fluffy indoor dogs that liked to avail themselves of the plush white carpets.
All this is part of Daphne’s downsized lifestyle. He used to have a bigger mansion, with a swimming pool and a tennis court, a gym and a movie theater. He once parked his yacht in the glittering harbors of the Côte d’Azur. But he has fashioned a new life for himself in Israel, which has yet to grant France’s request for his extradition.
Daphne wanted me to know that to him the carbon scam was a negligible chapter in a long and successful criminal career. It wasn’t his most lucrative scheme; it wasn’t even the first opportunity he’d pursued in the lumpish market of environmental interventions conceived by a civilization in ecological peril. Plus, he was just one of many people who ripped off the emissions-trading system.
Daphne and other scammers’ pillaging of Europe’s carbon market constitutes what the media have called “the fraud of the century”—billions of euros were stolen in a matter of months. The shadowy scheme attracted established crime rings and amateur hucksters alike, many of whom knew each other. But the scam lent itself to duplicity: No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing. Its web reached the boxing rings of Las Vegas, the offices of Germany’s biggest bank, the caves along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding, and the gilded restaurants of Paris, where it also left blood spattered on the streets. It pulled in a playboy demi-celebrity, an Afghan refugee, a flashy street hustler who couldn’t accumulate enough bling, an immaculate businessman who hobnobbed with the queen of England, the doyenne of Marseille’s underground, and a man some people called the Brain.
The Brain’s real name is Grégory Zaoui, and he claims that the entire scam was his idea. Even though the fraud sprouted across Europe, Zaoui insists that he was the only person smart enough to have planted the seed. Daphne, he says, gets far too much credit for his role in ripping off the carbon market.
Zaoui is stout and broad chinned, with thick eyebrows and a sweep of dark hair. When he was involved in the carbon scam, he took pains to remain understated. He favored dress shirts in pale blue or white. Even when he was photographed alongside some of the highest-ranking politicians in France, including a president and a prime minister, his demeanor was almost retreating. When he spent money, he did it quietly; he twice rented out an entire Hermès store in central Paris so his girlfriend could shop in privacy. Journalists described him in terms they would never use for Daphne: discreet, cerebral, analytical. Even though they grew up within miles of each other, Daphne and Zaoui couldn’t be more different.
When Zaoui was hauled in front of police, some 15 years ago now, he said that he’d been betrayed. He went into the business with the wrong person, he claimed, which meant that his scheme was doomed from the start. Someone he’d once considered among his closest friends double-crossed him so wickedly that he never really reaped the rewards he deserved for being a carbon fraudster.
Zaoui agreed to meet me in Paris last May, at a restaurant in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, the Lutetia, where a Coca-Cola costs 12 euros and an army of valets swarm the entrance. He arrived late wearing sweatpants and a raincoat, and he was in a frazzled state because he’d misplaced his card for the city’s charging stations, which he required to replenish the battery on his electric scooter. When he settled in, he wanted to set the record straight about his and Daphne’s respective roles in Europe’s carbon fraud. Until now, he told me, no one had truly understood the relationship between them. “He is the prince,” Zaoui told me. “But I am the king.”
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This edition of the Top 5 looks at Ukraine’s defiant underground beauty salons, the fight for a wild butterfly population, the meaning behind the quilts crafted in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, the world of Criterion Collection, and the shifting role of the call center worker.
Sophia Panych | Allure | February 22, 2024 | 4,531 words
As the war in Ukraine enters its third year, beauty salons in the country have become symbols of perseverance and resistance. Salon owners go to work despite the constant threat of missile strikes. They’ve moved their businesses underground. When they have no access to electricity and water, they run on generators and use bottled water. They’ve also adapted to working in the dark, painting clients’ nails under the glow of headlamps. Unfazed by air-raid sirens, they’re accustomed to calculating risks. Sirens can sound up to a dozen times a day, a cosmetologist from Zaporizhzhia, a city close to the frontlines, tells Sophia Panych: “At that rate, it would take all day to finish just one facial.” In this piece, Panych asks, “Does beauty even have a place in a society at war?” For many salon owners in central and eastern Ukraine, the answer is an emphatic yes. Many Ukrainian women have felt a deep sense of patriotism and duty to jumpstart the economy, while salon patrons get their hair cut and nails done to take control—and find normalcy—in an unstable time. “Every blowout, every massage, every pedicure they provide is a statement of defiance against an enemy that wishes to see them destroyed,” writes Panych. They’re also communal acts of self-care. A longtime beauty editor with Ukrainian roots, Panych had been looking for a way to write about the country since 2022, but she hadn’t found an appropriate angle. But her reporting here, on the unexpected resilience of Ukraine’s beauty industry, comes together beautifully in an inspiring piece on the courage and resourcefulness of ordinary citizens in a time of war. —CLR
In his latest for Hakai Magazine, Brian Payton creates excitement from the start: “They are ravenous and roving. Newly emerged from a six-month state of suspended animation, over a dozen larvae scale the crumpled paper towel inside a plastic cup.” I love Payton’s writing—I don’t yet know the name of these creatures, but I am already rooting for them. These are Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly larvae; they favor “bright, moist, open wildflower meadows” and were once abundant from Willamette Valley in Oregon to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Today, only 13 wild populations remain, but conservationists in the US and Canada—including some incarcerated women who care for the butterflies—are trying to change that, for the butterflies and for humans who may not understand the critical role insects play in life on our planet. “Insects help create and sustain the natural systems terrestrial life depends on,” he writes. “A world with fewer insects is a world with less flora, fauna, and food.” Payton’s piece is educational and entertaining, a welcome and necessary spark of joy. This butterfly is particularly magnificent and Payton records them with thoughtful detail: “In April or May, they emerge as adults and take to the air on wings of vivid red or orange and white, outlined in black, calling to mind the brightly hued geometry of stained-glass windows.” What’s perhaps most beautiful (in addition to learning that the collective noun for butterflies is a kaleidoscope)? The Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly lives for only 14 days, but in that time, it does its part to help life on this planet to thrive. That humans are banding together to help the species? It sets my hopes aflutter. —KS
Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | February 21, 2024 | 5,680 words
Gee’s Bend, Alabama, is famous for its quilters. Maybe you’ve seen their work in a museum or on a US postal stamp—it is abstract, geometric, and arresting. The quilters are Black women descended from slaves, and their craft is a tradition born of necessity. To keep warm, have a soft place to sleep, and swaddle newborns, the quilters’ forebears made what they needed with what they had. How, then, to view the contemporary acclaim for Gee’s Bend quilts that focuses more on aesthetics than function? Or the forces of capitalism that invited the acclaim in the first place? There’s a moment in this essay by Jeannette Cooperman when one of the quilters asks the author, “Who discovered art, do you know?” The line took my breath away because it’s a Russian doll of questions. To address it in any meaningful way requires asking other questions about the nature of art, the power dynamics of discovery, and how knowledge is shared across time and space. Cooperman does a splendid job lacing these lines of inquiry through the essay while also suggesting that trying too hard to answer them risks missing the point of creating and experiencing beauty—which is to say, the doing and the feeling. “Quilts were about loving people. And saving and re-using honored the material world,” Cooperman writes. “When Missouri Pettway’s husband died, she made a quilt from his old work clothes . . . so she could warm herself with the memory of him, ‘cover up under it for love.’” —SD
Joshua Hunt | The New York Times Magazine | February 29, 2024 | 4,230 words
There are three primary kinds of business profiles. You’ve got your classic schadenfreude-fueled Rise and Fall, your everyone-loves-a-comeback Redemption Tale, and your Company at the Crossroads. All can be compelling. All can also feel like sponsored content. Joshua Hunt’s feature about Criterion Collection, that beloved reissuer of movies, manages to skirt that issue by being a culture story rather than a business one. Criterion started with LaserDisc, then moved to DVD and streaming; what’s remained constant is its seemingly bottomless love of film and commitment to supplemental materials, which Hunt conveys through director interviews as well as Criterion employees. Cinephile icons (Jim Jarmusch, Kelly Reichardt), A24 darlings (the Safdie Brothers), and even Michael Bay show up to discuss their favorite Criterion memories. Criterion’s warts are on display as well—its tendency to ignore Black filmmakers, the heavy toll exacted by its streaming strategy—further helping steer the piece away from Valentine territory. Obsession is as universal as it is single-minded, and stories like this bear that out perfectly: I may never have the encyclopedic knowledge that these filmmakers do, but I’ll also never tire of reading about another person’s lifelong passion. —PR
Sophie Elmhirst | 1843 Magazine | February 2, 2024 | 4,739 words
“It reminds me of processed cheese, Sophie,” says Gary, a call center worker, during his chat with Sophie Elmhirst on AI technology. Gary tells it how it is. I love Gary. An instantly endearing character, he epitomizes the sense of personality that could be lost as call center work edges further into the realm of the robot. Don’t get me wrong—we don’t always get a Gary when we call a customer service line. Elmhirst recounts, with her trademark dry humor, some of her less enjoyable calls (you will relate). But Gary from Vision Direct has her laughing as he guides her through ordering new contact lenses like they were “engaged in some kind of high-stakes joint project.” Roping him into an interview, she discovers more about the infectious joy he brings to customers, even after 20 years of working in call centers. Can AI ever replicate this? Perhaps. Developments are happening faster than the public or regulators can keep up with, and automating empathy is already in the works. In fact, as Elmhirst notes, ChatGPT recently scored better on standardized emotional awareness tests than the general population, according to a paper in Frontiers in Psychology. (Not sure if that says more about ChatGPT or the general population.) As is often the case with AI, there is much talk of hybrid roles, but inevitably, there will be less room for the traditional call center worker. The topic of AI use in customer service calls had the potential to be incredibly dull. Elmhirst makes it wildly entertaining. Gary makes it human. —CW
Matthew Bremner | Esquire | February 15, 2024 | 8,100 words
Twenty-six years ago, Barton McNeil called 911 to report that his 3-year-old daughter had died in the night. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to any parent. Then a new nightmare began. Matthew Bremner tells the harrowing story through a personal lens. —SD
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Commentary tracks? Presenting films in their original letterbox format? Both started with Criterion, the company that’s been reissuing beloved movies for more than 40 years. Joshua Hunt dives into the history of the Criterion Collection, interviewing filmmakers and employees alike—and exploding the myth that the catalog contains only the artiest cinephile bait.
In September, when I called Michael Bay at his home in Miami, he seemed blissfully unaware that many cinephiles don’t think his films belong in the collection. He was also unaware of Criterion’s continued existence, but told me quite earnestly how “cool” it was that they were still around. His enthusiasm for its LaserDiscs was palpable as he described washing cars for the cash to buy them, just as he did to afford the best stereo equipment. “I just remember it being the pinnacle,” Bay said of the brand. Bay also gamely entertained my questions about the most infamous feature of Criterion’s commentary track for “Armageddon,” in which the movie’s star, Ben Affleck, mentions an on-set spat with Bay over the plot: Why, Affleck wondered, would it be easier to prepare oil-rig workers for outer-space travel than to train NASA astronauts how to drill into and then destroy an asteroid on a collision course with earth? “I told him to shut the [expletive] up,” Bay said. “Ben has a wry personality, so you just have to come back at him with that same type of personality.”
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In an excerpt adapted from his book, Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State, Byron Tau reveals how advertising data collected from mobile phones has been used to track the movements of members of the military and even those closest to Vladimir Putin. What’s most troubling is that this advertising data can be purchased by nearly anyone—even bad actors.
If you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are, there is a good chance a log of your precise movements has been saved in some data bank that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies.
While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.
They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.
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In December, The New York Times published a front-page story alleging that Hamas had committed systematic sexualized violence on October 7. The piece, which was written by a Pulitzer Prize-winner and two Israeli freelancers with very little journalism experience, has since come under scrutiny. The Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, even shelved an episode about the story because of serious questions about the reporting. In this damning dissection, Intercept journalists lay bare the decisions that led to the story’s publication in the first place, some of which one of the freelancers, Anat Schwartz, articulated in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 news:
Schwartz began her work on the violence of October 7 where one would expect, by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”
The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. She described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”
As Schwartz began her own efforts to find evidence of sexual assault, the first specific allegations of rape began to emerge. A person identified in anonymous media interviews as a paramedic from the Israeli Air Force medical unit 669 claimed he saw evidence that two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their bedroom. The man made other outrageous claims, however, that called his report into question. He claimed another rescuer “pulled out of the garbage” a baby who’d been stabbed multiple times. He also said he had seen “Arabic sentences that were written on entrances to houses … with the blood of the people that were living in the houses.” No such messages exist, and the story of the baby in the trashcan has been debunked. The bigger problem was that no two girls at the kibbutz fit the source’s description. In future interviews, he changed the location to Kibbutz Be’eri. But no victims killed there matched the description either, as Mondoweiss reported.
After seeing these interviews, Schwartz started calling people at Kibbutz Be’eri and other kibbutzim that were targeted on October 7 in an effort to track down the story. “Nothing. There was nothing,” she said. “No one saw or heard anything.” She then reached the unit 669 paramedic who relayed to Schwartz the same story he had told other media outlets, which she says convinced her there was a systematic nature to the sexual violence. “I say, ‘OK, so it happened, one person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random,” Schwartz concluded on the podcast.
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Two anthropologists looking to reshape the world via consciousness expansion. Dosing dolphins at a research institute in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Lab visits from a not-yet-famous 29-year-old Carl Sagan. A psychedelic subculture among crews of TV shows in the ’60s, including Flipper. Benjamin Breen’s piece—an excerpt from his book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science—recounts an interesting period in the history of psychedelics and leaves you wanting to read more. (Signup required.)
The recordings were grist for Lilly’s mill. By 1963, he was absolutely convinced that his dolphins were uttering coherent words in English — but at a speed so rapid and a pitch so high that only computerized manipulation could make them understandable. The payoff was vague, but in his mind immense. After all, if he could bridge the barrier in communication between these two radically different species, how could Americans and Soviets continue to claim that communication between their own camps was impossible?
In 1961, Sagan helped plan one of the first conferences on extraterrestrial life. The organizers had sought not just scientists interested in first-contact scenarios but also someone who already spoke to “aliens” — or at least the closest parallel that Earth afforded. Lilly was the obvious choice. Afterward, Sagan founded a whimsical scientific fraternal organization, the Order of the Dolphin, that was partially inspired by Lilly’s work. Now, three years later, Sagan was finally visiting Lilly’s “aliens” in person.
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