Tunnel Vision

The Lotso Mystery A few weeks ago, a subscriber named Marco De Nobili told me a story. Walking the streets of Shenzhen and Guangzhou during a work trip to China, he noticed something strange: Lotso — or Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear, the cuddly pink villain from Toy Story 3 — was everywhere. Images of his face were emblazoned on the sides of cars, scooters, and mopeds; shops were filled to the brim with every kind of Lotso-themed merchandise. Marco was confused. He’d been to China before, most recently in 2018. But he’d never seen anything like this. In Europe, where he lives, Lotso isn’t a particularly well-known character. Same goes where I live in the United States — you’ll see plenty of Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, Snoopy, or Winnie-the-Pooh. But in China, Lotso has become a phenomenon. Marco wanted to know why. I went down a rabbit hole to figure it out.

When my friend Paji wanted to buy a ChatGPT subscription, he did the same thing a lot of us do when we’re looking for something on the internet: he searched for it on Google and clicked on the first link. Soon after, he’d signed up for a year-long subscription to an AI chatbot. There was just one problem. It wasn’t ChatGPT — it was an AI aggregator service that showed up first in search results. We teamed up to figure out: What determines what makes it to the top of Search results? And how easy is it to game the system?

The North Korean IT worker scheme, explained. A new kind of threat is quietly slipping into the remote workforce. At first glance, the job applicants look normal enough. Polished resumes. Sharp skills. Professional headshots. But behind their green screen Zoom background lies a startling secret: They’re North Korean operatives. Thousands of North Korean workers are securing remote roles at companies across the US, Europe, and East Asia. They’re using fake identities to earn real paychecks — paychecks that directly fund the North Korean government. I wanted to find out what it takes to actually meet one of these workers. So I went down a rabbit hole — and found a story even stranger than I expected.

My favorite sunscreen disappeared from the internet. Where did it go? A few years ago, social media videos convinced me to change my habits around sunscreen. I started buying sunscreen not from my local drugstore, but from the internet: Sunscreens from Japan, France, Australia, and South Korea. These products went viral on platforms like TikTok, where fans praised just how comfortable and effective international sunscreens were compared to their American counterparts. But then one day, those products disappeared from the internet in the US. I wanted to understand what happened to my new favorite sunscreen — and whether or not the US can ever catch up to the sunscreen in the rest of the world.

I didn’t care too much about being surveilled. One company changed my mind. There’s a kind of surveillance camera I can’t stop thinking about. Across the United States, they watch over city street corners, store parking lots, and suburban neighborhoods. They register every single license plate that passes by, compiling that data into a massive searchable police database. And — in just a few years — they’ve spread all over the country largely thanks to a single tech startup. Over the past month, I’ve been down a rabbit hole trying to understand how these automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, spread so quickly across the country — and what they mean for our right to privacy.

I figured out why I keep getting plagiarized. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed something strange on YouTube. When I search for an old video I made, I’ll find it — but right below, there’s often something else: copycats. Some are AI-generated recreations that twist my original scripts and visuals into something uncanny, while others are near-identical remakes stitched together from my own work. I set out to find out whether any of this was legal — and discovered how new tools are blurring the line between inspiration and exploitation.

The quest to measure the internet’s bot problem For as long as I’ve been on social media, people have worried about bots. But in recent years, that concern seems to have exploded — some people even claim bots now outnumber real users. I wanted to find out: do we actually know how many bots are on the platforms we use every day? And if we do, what exactly are they doing there?