Elizabeth Holmes is the unlikely star of the year’s most talked-about movie, You Can See Everything. The Holmes we meet onscreen is enigmatic, enough so that some viewers have even begun to root for her.

To Tyler Shultz, though, she’s still his former boss who tried to take apart his life and his family. What it was like working at Theranos, and what it’s been like watching the internet react to the new Elizabeth Holmes.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

Alex Gibney’s documentary The Inventor

Sign up to become an Incognito Mode member!

A new scam – aided by AI and remote work – is letting one of the most sanctioned regimes on Earth sneak tech workers into the American job market. How it works, what they’re like as co-workers, and the stories of the Americans swept up in the scheme. 

Inside North Korea’s Operation to Conquer the American Job Market

Send us your questions for our upcoming AMA!

Sign up to become an Incognito Mode member!

Jensen Huang is CEO of the most valuable company in human history, NVIDIA. He is arguably the one person who could slow down the AI race. But he’s made a massive bet that AI is safe. 

Is that conviction, insulation, salesmanship, or something else? 

We find answers in his very unusual life story. 

The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt

Sign up for Incognito Mode

An interview with a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn, who started lying to herself about her relationship to alcohol and God. And afterwards wondered: when did it start? Why did it happen? How do you make peace with the part of yourself that wants something that could destroy you? 

Meghan O’Gieblyn, Will and Attention

Sign up for Incognito Mode

Nine months ago, three podcasters attempted to build a better internet. Today -- they confront foreign adversaries on a digital battlefield.

Watch the Machine Gods trailer.

Instructions for moving your Forkiverse account to a different server.

Become a premium member!

Search Engine has some exciting news about the moving image to announce, and we’re sharing an interview we loved with an unusual architect.

Check out the video version on Freakonomics' YouTube page.

An email hits our inbox with the subject line: “My Dad is making a Bollywood Movie… is he being scammed?” We investigate. 

Become a premium subscriber.

A Japanese listener gets so many houseguests she starts a spreadsheet to try to figure out what's going on. Why has American tourism to Japan gotten so out of control? The story of a government plot.

Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. by Roland Kelts

Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style by W. David Marx

Become a premium subscriber!

Mahmud Almadhoun ran a soup kitchen in the north of the Gaza Strip. In November 2024, he was killed. A reporter tries to answer a big question. Was Mahmud intentionally targeted? And if so, what does that mean about the future of war?

Listen to The Gaza Chef.

Become a premium member!

A listener asks: whose penis gets the top spot on the Wikipedia page for penis?

Our quest for an answer takes us on a surprisingly philosophical journey — where we learn about the cutthroat fight to be number one and the extremely overthink-y debate that precedes the coronation.

Wikipedia page for Lane Rasberry.

Wikipedia page for penis.

Wikipedia page for human penis.

Become a premium member!

The midterms are approaching, and as the discourse heats up, one of the big new villains is: a kind of building. Data centers. Reporter Jasmine Sun took a road trip through two swing states to meet the people living at the center of these debates, and to understand where this all might be headed.  

no data centers in my backyard by Jasmine Sun