In today’s hyperconnected world, traveling without a phone seems impossible, or at the very least, pointless. But for those who’ve done it, the experience can be rewarding and rejuvenating. In January, Soraya Lemboumba, 40, a project manager in Switzerland, spent 10 days in Panama on a phone-free trip. “It was absolutely life-changing,” she said. She said she awoke to the sounds of nature rather than an alarm and didn’t spend her time composing captions for social media in her head or use her phone to fill the silence. “I spent days immersed in pure presence,” she said. Thinking of disconnecting for your next trip? Here are some steps to start. Decide your rules Before leaving for the airport, decide whether you’re bringing a laptop or tablet or nothing at all. A laptop performs all the functions of your smartphone, but you’re less likely to bring it to dinner table or the beach. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Then, if you’re bringing a device, write down a list of rules to govern your tech use throughout your trip. For example: I won’t use electronics for entertainment on this trip. If I can’t hail a taxi, I’ll use my laptop for Uber. I’ll use my tablet only an hour per day for researching activities and lodging. A physical list codifies a system and eliminates temptation during those bored, anxious moments that inevitably arise during travel, which prompt you to grab your device. You can modify the rules throughout your trip if you feel they’re not working. Downloading app blocker extensions like Freedom, ScreenZen and Opal can block apps or websites like YouTube, Instagram and X for preset periods of time. Temporarily deleting apps is another effective way to prevent mindless scrolling. Navigating the airport Most anxiety from phoneless travel centers on logistics, like what will happen at the airport or train station, where there are schedules, and possible delays and cancellations. As a rule of thumb, allow ample time for transportation — at least an extra hour to buffer against scheduling mishaps or contingencies. Without a phone to display e-tickets, you’ll need to rely on paper boarding passes. Most airlines will print them out for you at the kiosks free of charge. But be careful, some airlines — namely Frontier — charge a $25 fee per person, per direction, to print boarding passes. Avoid this fee by printing them out beforehand. With no airline app, you’ll need to remember to keep an eye on those monitors throughout the airport for delays and gate changes, and don’t hesitate to ask the gate attendants and airline employees for help or directions. Catherine Price, the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, reminds us that digitized travel isn’t always desirable. “People forget that you can rely on paper,” Ms. Price says, “and the feeling of freedom outweighs any minor inconvenience.” Getting your bearings When you arrive at your lodging, introduce yourself to the front desk and concierge, addressing them by their first names — a scientifically proven way to curry favor, which can be helpful if you need directions printed or taxis hailed throughout your trip. To orient yourself near your hotel or other lodging, walk in increasingly larger concentric circles outward. Use physical maps and expect mistakes. The beauty of phoneless travel comes in the hiccups, as wrong turns often lead to incredible memories. You’ll find that you learn a city faster by relying on your wits and not GPS, which is a thrilling realization. Write down the full address of your accommodations and keep it safely tucked into your wallet in case you get lost. Worst-case scenario, show it to a taxi driver or a local. In place of a translator app, pick up a phrase book to carry with you (Lonely Planet’s, in numerous languages, cost around $12). If you adopt a conversationalist’s mind-set, your trip will blossom in special, unforeseen ways. If you’re confronted with a QR code for, say, museum entry, merely explain your situation to the person behind you and ask to tag along, giving them cash for the ticket. This is how you unexpectedly make friends and access the serendipity of travel. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Taking pictures without a phone Purchase a disposable camera or a digital camera for $50, and practice a philosophy of intention — take one picture of something you want to remember, then put your camera away. “Every time you take a picture on vacation, you take yourself out of the moment,” Ms. Price said. “You get too wrapped up in photos, especially if you’re taking them to post on social media for others. Don’t perform your vacation. Live it.” Writing in a journal at the end of the day can solidify the memories you’ve made. Instead of looking back through pictures on your phone, you can read your vacation and relive these cherished memories in a more illustrative way. Taking “mental snapshots” helped Ms. Lemboumba internalize memories by mindfully soaking in experiences as they happened. “The moments I didn’t photograph are, ironically, now the ones I remember the most vividly,” she said. Handling emergencies The prospect of an emergency keeps many from attempting phoneless travel, but real emergencies are rare. The emergencies you’re likely to face are practical ones, like missing a train. These may seem catastrophic in the moment, but with the right attitude they’re nothing more than speed bumps. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Since you won’t have Apple Pay or similar services, in addition to a credit card, carry $200 to $300 in local currency in a secured travel bag that straps across your body. (Cash is handy for extricating yourself from sticky situations.) For female solo travelers who are anxious about phoneless travel, buy a prepaid burner phone for $40 and stick it in the bottom of your backpack. You can always borrow a phone in a time of crisis, and always let loved ones know your itinerary ahead of time. If phoneless solo travel feels too daunting, consider joining a group. Grace Borges, a 35-year-old research analyst from Washington, attended a five-day phoneless trip to Cuba last year with FTLO Travel, which specializes in group travel for young professionals. The tour guide handled logistics, and because she was in a group, “sticking to the phoneless ethos was easier because everyone was in the same boat,” she said. Remember in moments of stress: Everyone traveled this way just a few decades ago.

So you can whip together a weekend bag or fit a fortnight’s worth of outfits into a rolling suitcase, but does your status as “packing guru” extend to your phone or tablet? Think of your device as a second carry-on, with its own packing list of apps that are essential for entertainment, getting around, safety and more. “Everyone talks about making the super app, the one place for everything you need,” said Gilbert Ott, partnerships director at Point.me, a website that helps travelers manage loyalty points, “but no one has done it yet.” Until that super travel app exists, here are some suggested apps to download before you go. Safety and security Public Wi-Fi networks like those in cafes and hotels may not be secure, so to keep criminals from intercepting passwords, credit card numbers and emails, “it’s better to encrypt your internet activity,” said Mr. Ott. One method to keep data secure is to download and use virtual private networks like NordVPN or ExpressVPN, which encrypt your web doings. Both charge about $13 per month for a monthly plan, and about half that rate for a yearly plan. Another VPN provider, Mullvad, charges about $5.50 per month. It may be tempting to store copies of important documents like passports, health insurance cards and prescriptions on your phone as photos, but it’s more secure to use apps that encrypt that information, like 1Password (starting at $35.88 per year) and Microsoft OneDrive Personal Vault (included with a $99.99-per-year Microsoft 365 subscription or, for nonsubscribers, three files free storage). Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Getting around The U.S. government’s free Mobile Passport Control app can help U.S. citizens and some other groups — even travelers not in the Global Entry program — make their way through immigration and customs more quickly by scanning their passport into the app and adding a selfie within four hours of arrival. Preloading the information speeds your interaction with the officer. For detailed information on public transportation that can go beyond Google Maps, Moovit (free with ads or Moovit+ with additional features and no ads for $17.99 per year) and Citymapper (free with ads or $9.99 per year) can help with routes, fares and trip length around the world. In cities like New York and London, make sure you’ve loaded a credit or debit card in your digital wallet and set it up for transit to avoid lines by using touchless payment at turnstiles. In some countries, hailing a cab on the street may be difficult or unsafe. So where Uber and Lyft aren’t available, download local trusted ride-hailing apps that offer set fares and location tracking. In Vietnam, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, for example, Grab offers rides in cars, taxis and on the backs of motorcycles. In India, Ola is a popular choice. Entertainment For hours spent in planes, trains and hotel rooms, load your device with a mix of diversions and destination information. Taylor Beal, a travel blogger from Philadelphia, who leads high school groups on trips to Europe, recommends borrowing electronic library books using Libby and Hoopla. The apps are free but require a local library card from one of the more than 90,000 participating public libraries and schools. For road trips in the United States, the phone app Autio ($35.99 annually, with a free trial) offers 23,000 short stories and information about the surrounding landscape and history, based on your location. Offerings include Kevin Costner on the northern Great Plains and John Lithgow on “Footloose” filming locations. Traveling together Keeping track of who paid for what among a group of friends can be a fun-killing chore. Jamie Larounis, a travel industry analyst for Upgraded Points, recommends Splitwise Pro ($39.99 per year, or a limited free version), which tracks and divides up expenses for taxis, meals and more. Other apps like Tricount (free) and Settle Up (free, or $19.99 per year for the premium version) offer similar services. For tracking flights and making plans either solo or with companions, TripIt (free version or TripItPro $49 per year) and Wanderlog (free version or Wanderlog Pro for $39.99 per year) can tame even complicated itineraries. Translating You may already have Google Translate on your device, but that app also has some lesser-known handy features. Point your camera at a foreign menu, train station sign or receipt, for example, and Google can translate it — even with non-Roman characters. The Conversation button in the app lets you pass your phone back and forth when you’re trying to get directions, order food, ask for help and more. You can even create a custom phrase book in the app. Local attractions Bloomberg Connects has teamed up with more than 800 museums and other cultural spaces, like the New York Botanical Garden, around the world to offer free information on their exhibits, complementing local organizations like the Musée Carnavalet, a history museum in Paris, which often have institution-specific apps. Of course, there’s also always the good, old-fashioned way to travel — wandering around and letting serendipity take the lead. Is there an app for that, too?

In the balmy late afternoon of Aug. 25, 2024, Sushil and Radhika Chetal were house-hunting in Danbury, Conn., in an upscale neighborhood of manicured yards and heated pools. Sushil, a vice president at Morgan Stanley in New York, was in the driver’s seat of a new matte gray Lamborghini Urus, an S.U.V. with a price tag starting around $240,000. As they turned a corner, the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping the Chetals. According to a criminal complaint filed after the incident, a group of six men dressed in black and wearing masks emerged from their vehicles and forced the Chetals from their car, dragging them toward the van’s open side door. When Sushil resisted, the assailants hit him with a baseball bat and threatened to kill him. The men bound the couple’s arms and legs with duct tape. They forced Radhika to lie face down and told her not to look at them, even as she struggled to breathe, pleading that she had asthma. They wrapped Sushil’s face with duct tape and hit him several more times with the bat as the van peeled off. Several witnesses saw the attack and called 911. Some of them, including an off-duty F.B.I. agent who lived nearby and happened to be at the scene, trailed the van and the Honda, relaying the vehicles’ movements to the police. The F.B.I. agent managed to obtain partial license plate numbers. Danbury police officers soon located the van. A patrol vehicle activated its emergency lights and tried to make a stop, but the driver of the van accelerated, swerving recklessly through traffic. About a mile from where the chase began, the driver careered off the road and struck a curb. Four suspects fled on foot. The police found one hiding under a bridge and apprehended him after a brief chase. Within a couple of hours, the other three were located hiding in a wooded area nearby. The police, meanwhile, found the shaken Chetals bound in the back of the van. Detective Sgt. Steve Castrovinci of the Danbury Police Department had the day off when the shift commander called him at home about the incident. “We got a kidnapping, a legit kidnapping,” he remembers the shift commander telling him. Castrovinci called a few of his detectives to get up to speed and then stopped at the crime scene before driving to the station to speak to the suspects. Based on information provided by one of the suspects in custody, two more assailants were found and arrested the following morning at an Airbnb rental in Roxbury, a 30-minute drive from Danbury, where the white Civic was also parked. For Castrovinci, it was a strange and dramatic case. Danbury is a well-off, quiet place, and while the police there did get the odd kidnapping case, they were almost always related to child custody. A violent midday abduction was unheard-of. There was no apparent connection between the suspects and the Chetals, and, stranger still, law enforcement discovered that the suspects — men between the ages of 18 and 26 — had traveled to Connecticut all the way from Miami. They’d rented the van on the app Turo. “This is a case — you may only get one of these, one or two of these, in a career,” Castrovinci, who has been in law enforcement for 20 years, including five with the New York Police Department, told me. “Not in this area. We don’t deal with stuff like this.” For weeks, the police said very little. Castrovinci and his team worked to piece together a motive. It was hard to believe that the Chetals were targeted because of Sushil’s senior position at an investment bank. As a vice president at Morgan Stanley, he would have had an enviable salary, but nothing out of the ordinary for Danbury. And if money was the kidnappers’ motive, it was bizarre that they left behind the Chetals’ Lamborghini, which was found abandoned in the woods. None of it seemed quite right. A few days after the attempted kidnapping, though, Castrovinci says his team received a tip from the F.B.I. that cast the case in a strange new light: a possible connection to an enormous cryptocurrency heist, one that happened just a week before the attack. A group of young men, some of whom connected on a Minecraft server, were suspected of taking a quarter of a billion dollars from an unwitting victim, setting off an incredible chain of events that involved an online network of cybercriminals, some of them teenagers; a group of independent digital detectives who track their efforts; and several law-enforcement agencies. Now, it seemed, the whole thing had culminated in the kidnapping of the Chetals — a real-world spillover from the brazen lawlessness of this expanding digital underworld and the culture that surrounds it. The chain of events began a couple of weeks earlier when a resident of Washington, D.C., began receiving suspicious sign-in notifications on his Google account. The logins appeared as though they were coming from overseas. Then on Aug. 18, he received a phone call from someone claiming to be on Google’s security team. The caller said the user’s email account had been compromised. The call appeared to be legitimate — the caller knew the D.C. resident’s personal information. The account holder, the caller said, would need to shut down his account unless he could verify certain personal information over the phone, which he did. Shortly after the call with the supposed Google agent, the same D.C. resident, whose identity remains concealed in federal court documents, received a second call from someone who said they were a security-team representative from Gemini, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange. Like the supposed Google employee, he had the man’s personal information; he explained that his Gemini account, which held about $4.5 million worth of coins, had been hacked and that the man needed to reset his two-factor authentication and transfer the Bitcoin in his account to another wallet to keep it safe. The person on the phone then suggested that the account holder download a program that would provide additional security. The man agreed, not knowing that he was downloading a remote-desktop app, which would give the caller access to his computer — and access to a second crypto account, exposing him to an even more staggering theft. It turned out that the D.C. resident, an early investor in cryptocurrency, had more than 4,100 Bitcoin in total. Ten years ago, that much Bitcoin was worth about $1 million; that day, it was worth more than $243 million. Within minutes, it was all gone. A central paradox of crypto is that, although coin owners are generally not identifiable, transactions are recorded on a public ledger known as a blockchain. This means that when the currency moves, anyone can see it. This paradox has enabled a new class of sleuths who can identify suspicious transactions on the blockchain. One of the best of these digital detectives goes by the handle ZachXBT, an independent investigator of crypto-related crimes. ZachXBT is a well-known and elusive figure in the crypto world. He regularly posts threads detailing his investigations on X, where he has about 850,000 followers, exposing supposed wrongdoers, sometimes by name. Often, he shares his findings with law enforcement. Wired described him as “the most prolific independent crypto-focused detective in the world.” He doesn’t share his real identity online. Minutes after the D.C. resident’s funds were liquidated, ZachXBT was walking through the airport on his way to catch a flight when he received an alert on his phone about an unusual transaction. Crypto investigators use tools to monitor the global flows of various coins and set alerts for, say, any transaction over $100,000 that goes through certain exchanges that charge a premium for having few security safeguards. The initial alert that day was for a mid-six-figure transaction, followed by higher amounts, all the way up to $2 million. After he cleared airport security, ZachXBT sat down, opened his laptop and began tracing transactions back to a Bitcoin wallet with roughly $240 million in crypto. Some of the Bitcoin in the wallet dated back to 2012. “At that point it didn’t make sense,” he told me. “Why is a person who held their Bitcoin for this long using a sketchy service that typically sees a lot of illicit funds flow through it?” He added the wallets associated with the transactions to his tracking and boarded the plane. Once he connected to in-flight internet, more alerts arrived. Throughout the day, the Bitcoin traced to the wallet was being liquidated through more than 15 different high-fee cryptocurrency services. After he landed, ZachXBT messaged a few other investigators who specialize in cryptocurrency theft. Among them was Josh Cooper-Duckett, director of investigations for Cryptoforensic Investigators, one of a growing number of independent firms that track crypto theft and fraud and help law enforcement recover currency for the victims. Cooper-Duckett, a 26-year-old from London, developed an early interest in crypto, and after working in security at Deloitte for three and a half years, started investigating crypto theft, focusing on cases where the financial loss is at least $100,000, of which there are a lot these days. ZachXBT told Cooper-Duckett and the other investigators what he discovered, and they all agreed it was suspicious to see a quarter-billion-dollar wallet liquidated this way. “Somebody like that, that has that much money, does not wake up one day on the weekend and decide, Well, I’m just going to start sending to a bunch of exchanges and trying to convert for Monero and Ethereum — they don’t do that.” The crypto investigators contacted the exchanges and services to inform them of the theft so they could freeze the currency and coordinate with the authorities. Some did; others didn’t. “In this case, it was a lot of Whac-a-Mole,” Cooper-Duckett says. “They’re trying a lot of different exchanges, a lot of different services to see what works. I mean, they have $240 million to launder. That’s a lot of money.” On X, ZachXBT notified his followers about the heist in progress. “Seven hours ago a suspicious transfer was made from a potential victim for 4064 BTC ($238M),” he wrote. Funds were transferred to THORChain, eXch, KuCoin, ChangeNOW, RAILGUN and Avalanche Bridge, all crypto services. ZachXBT noticed that the victim had received bankruptcy payouts from Genesis, a lending platform, which filed for bankruptcy in 2023, related to the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. Using his network, he was eventually able to connect with the victim over email. The shocked D.C. resident hired ZachXBT, Cryptoforensic and another crypto investigation firm to help track his stolen funds. That same day, he filed a police report with the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, and ZachXBT messaged his contacts in law enforcement. (The F.B.I. and the Department of Justice declined to comment for this article.) Cryptocurrency theft is growing at such a rate that federal investigators struggle to keep up. According to its latest report, the Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 69,000 claims in 2023 regarding financial fraud involving crypto, resulting in more than $5.6 billion in reported losses, a 45 percent increase from 2022. Although just 10 percent of all financial fraud complaints were crypto-related, the losses associated with those complaints accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total. Cryptocurrency’s decentralized nature, the irreversibility of transactions and the ability to move digital coins around the world make it appealing to criminals and difficult for the F.B.I. to recover funds, the report said. In 2022, the F.B.I. created a special unit to combat crypto theft, called the Virtual Assets Unit (V.A.U.). Because of the scale of the crimes and the difficulty combating them, government agencies — including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, even the I.R.S. — rely on private firms and individuals who have a deep knowledge of the digital criminal underground, experts say. “Josh and Zach, they’re so good and so fast at the tracing,” says Nick Bax, founder of the cryptocurrency analysis firm Five I’s. Bax has worked with ZachXBT on several cases but has never seen his face; in their early meetings, ZachXBT used a voice-altering software that made him sound like Mickey Mouse. “Like, I’m very good, but they’re — I will never be as good as them,” Bax says. “And I think their brains are, like, legitimately altered, because they started doing this at a young age.” Crypto investigators use fake accounts to immerse themselves in the forums where cybercriminals gather — Telegram, Discord and other platforms — to plot and brag about their exploits. The thieves are generally young and cavalier and sometimes leave a trail of clues in their wake. After ZachXBT’s X post about the heist, a source reached out to him through a throwaway account with potential clues about the identities of the thieves. The source sent ZachXBT several screen-share recordings, which he said were taken when one of the scammers livestreamed the heist for a group of his friends. The videos, which totaled an hour and a half, included the call with the victim. One clip featured the scammers’ live reaction when they realized they’d successfully stolen $243 million worth of the D.C. resident’s Bitcoin. A voice can be heard yelling: “Oh, my god! Oh, my god! $243 million! Yes! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Bro!” In private chats they used screen names like Swag, $$$ and Meech, but they made a crucial mistake. One of them flashed his Windows home screen, which revealed his real name in the start icon pop-up at the bottom of the screen: Veer Chetal, an 18-year-old from Danbury — the son of the couple who were kidnapped. A quiet honor student who had recently graduated from Immaculate High School in Danbury, Veer Chetal was about to begin studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022, he completed a “future lawyers” program, and a story that year on the Immaculate website showed a photo of a smiling kid with glasses wearing a Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker over a red polo. Classmates remember Chetal as shy and a fan of cars. “He just kind of kept to himself,” says Marco Dias, who became friends with Chetal junior year. According to another classmate named Nick Paris, this was true of Chetal until one day in the middle of his senior year, when he showed up at school driving a Corvette. “He just parked in the lot. It was 7:30 a.m., and everyone was like, What?” Paris says. Soon Chetal rolled up in a BMW, and then a Lamborghini Urus. He started wearing Louis Vuitton shirts and Gucci shoes, and on Senior Skip Day, while Paris and many of his classmates went to a nearby mall, Chetal took some friends, including Dias, to New York to party on a yacht he had rented, where they took photos holding wads of cash. Chetal said that he had made his money trading crypto; Dias says Chetal showed him trades on his phone as proof one morning during homeroom class. Once, Chetal rented a large house in Stamford, Conn., and hosted a three-day gathering with friends. “I was in the basement at one point, and I was just messing around with my friends, and I just see him, like, just on the couch, just like on his phone, pretty much avoiding everyone at the party,” Dias says. “And I thought, Oh, that’s kind of weird.” Paris remembers that during a school parade, the police stopped Chetal in his Lamborghini Urus for a traffic violation. “He literally called his lawyer on the spot before answering the cops’ questions, which everyone was like: Wow, this guy’s got, like, something going for him. Like, this guy’s got serious money.” Independent investigators say Chetal was secretly a member of the Com, also referred to as the Comm or the Community, an online network of chat groups that has its roots in the hacking underground of the 1980s and functions as a kind of social network for cybercriminals or aspiring ones. In an affidavit from an unrelated case, an F.B.I. agent described the Com as “a geographically diverse group of individuals, organized in various subgroups, all of whom coordinate through online communication applications such as Discord and Telegram to engage in various types of criminal activity.” According to the F.B.I. affidavit and experts who study the Com, the various subgroups’ activities include swatting, which entails making false reports to emergency services or institutions like schools to trigger a police response; SIM swapping, when hackers take over a target’s phone number, sometimes by tricking customer-service representatives; ransomware attacks, using a malware that denies users or organizers access to computer files; cryptocurrency theft; and corporate intrusions. Allison Nixon, the chief research officer of Unit 221B, a collective of cybersecurity experts, has been following this growing corner of the internet since 2011 and is widely considered to be a pre-eminent expert on the Com. She says most Com members are young men from Western countries. In group chats, many talk about college and taking classes in cybersecurity, which they use to their advantage, she says. The gateway for many is through video games like RuneScape, Roblox and Grand Theft Auto. By the mid-2010s, a more sinister world was also blossoming within Minecraft — the creative building game — facilitated by the advent of online servers, owned and operated by users, that allowed gamers to kill one another in teams, or “factions.” On these servers, Minecraft evolved into a highly competitive battle zone. With that came opportunities to monetize and scam. Servers soon began to introduce in-game purchases that gave players upgrades, like the ability to fly and to fight with more powerful weapons and armor. Other in-game purchases bought users stylish character outfits, which were wielded to show status online. As players gravitated toward these competitive servers, a large black market for in-game items and valuable user names started to blossom on Discord. With Minecraft dominated by young players, the black market became ripe for fraud. Users agreed to trade in-game items for real money via PayPal, but once the money was received, scammers would block the user’s account. This became so rampant that people started advertising themselves as verified middlemen who would take both the money and the in-game item and then hand it off to each party for a fee. One prized possession in this world is high-value user names, often no more than four letters — such as Tree, OK, Mark, YOLO or G, any of which could go for upward of $10,000. As faction-based servers and the Minecraft black market thrived, so did cryptocurrencies, which eventually supplanted PayPal on these servers. It was this combination of a consequence-free training ground for competition, gambling and fraud, with a growing familiarity with crypto, that turned Minecraft servers into a cesspool for budding cybercriminals. When the price of Bitcoin began to rise rapidly in 2017, Com members made an easy shift from Minecraft fraud to crypto theft. One of the popular Com forums was called “OGUsers.” It was initially dedicated to discussing and buying social media accounts and user names, but it evolved into a platform for cybercrime, including SIM swapping and Twitter account hijackings. “Very, very quickly these antisocial communities turned into overnight millionaires and propagated this culture, because people notice when other people turn into millionaires overnight, and they want to learn how they did that,” Nixon explains. “The size of the Com exploded.” A common tactic used by the Com today to steal cryptocurrency is what’s called social engineering, which entails manipulating users into divulging sensitive information. Com members put together long lists of potential victims, obtained through data breaches, and then directly target them, which is what occurred in the case of the D.C. victim. They will sometimes post job listings online to recruit people to help them with their schemes. One listing posted on Telegram that Nick Bax, the crypto investigator, shared with me promised “5f a week” — that is, five figures — “if ur not slow” to phone potential targets. “American professional customer service voice is required,” it read. Sometimes, Com members will then return to the Minecraft black market to launder their stolen crypto by buying valuable game items and selling the items for real dollars using PayPal. After ZachXBT had Veer Chetal’s name, it didn’t take long for him and other investigators to figure out the identities of others involved in the crypto heist. In the recordings ZachXBT obtained, the thieves referred to one another by their Com aliases, but also in some cases by their real first names. One name frequently uttered was Malone. This was Malone Lam, a known figure in the Com who went by the aliases Greavys and Anne Hathaway. Lam was a 20-year-old from Singapore and a notorious Minecraft player with bangs roughly chopped at his eye line. He had been banned from Minecraft servers only to maneuver his way back in. In the spring of 2023, when he got into a minor disagreement with the managers of the server Minecadia that resulted in him losing in-game items, he doxxed the staff, releasing their addresses and Social Security numbers online and, in at least one case, sending emergency services to their house, according to several users and Discord chats from the time. It was within Minecraft that Chetal and Lam first connected, playing together on a faction led by Lam. In October 2023, Lam arrived in the United States on a 90-day visa. He had largely stopped playing Minecraft. According to court documents, he began funding his lifestyle with other crypto-related fraud. After the August 2024 crypto heist, ZachXBT was able to track Lam through what’s called OSINT — open-source intelligence. In other words, social media. In Com chat groups, word was spreading that Lam was on a wild spending spree. Nobody seemed to know the source of his money, but they spoke of his lavish exploits at Los Angeles nightclubs. ZachXBT researched the most popular nightclubs in the city and then searched Instagram stories from partyers and the clubs themselves. In one post, Malone was filmed wearing a white Moncler jacket and what appeared to be diamond rings and diamond-encrusted sunglasses. He stood up on the table and began showering the crowd with hundred-dollar bills. As money rained down, servers paraded in $1,500 bottles of Champagne topped with sparklers and held up signs that read “@Malone.” He spent $569,528 in one evening alone. At one nightclub, Lam and his crew trolled ZachXBT, getting clubgoers to hold up signs reading “TOLD U WE’D WIN,” while another read, “[Expletive] ZACHXBT.” Over the course of a few weeks, Lam bought 31 automobiles, including custom Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsches, some valued as high as $3 million. On Aug. 24, he apparently sent a photo of a pink Lamborghini to a model. “I got you a present, we’ll call it an early birthday gift,” he texted her. She wrote back, “I am taken once again.” He replied, “idc” — I don’t care. On Sept. 10, after a 23-day party spree in Los Angeles, Lam headed to Miami on a private jet with a group of friends. There, he rented multiple homes, including a 10-bedroom, $7.5 million estate. Within a few days, Lam had filled the driveway with more luxury cars, including multiple Lamborghinis, one with the name “Malone” printed on the side. Every few days, ZachXBT sent the intelligence he’d collected to law enforcement. The information generally flowed one way, but federal authorities were conducting their own investigation simultaneously. According to court filings, the supposed co-conspirators used sophisticated money-laundering methods to hide the funds and mask their identities, using crypto exchanges like eXch, which does not require personal customer information, and VPN connections that disguise their locations. But in at least one instance, according to the authorities, one of them was sloppy, neglecting to use a VPN when he created an account with TradeOgre, a digital currency exchange, which connected to an I.P. address that was registered to a $47,500-per-month rental home in Encino, Calif. It was leased to Jeandiel Serrano, 21, who went by VersaceGod, @SkidStar and Box online. By the time the authorities identified Serrano, he was on vacation in the Maldives with his girlfriend. On Sept. 18, Serrano flew back from the Maldives to Los Angeles International Airport, where the authorities were waiting for him. He was wearing a $500,000 watch at the time of his arrest. Serrano initially denied knowledge of the theft and agreed to speak with law enforcement without a lawyer. But he soon acknowledged his involvement, according to court reports, specifically to impersonating a Gemini employee. Serrano admitted that he owned five cars, two of which were gifts from one of his co-conspirators, given to him with proceeds from a previous fraud. He also confessed to having access to approximately $20 million of the victim’s crypto on his phone and agreed to transfer the funds back to the F.B.I. At the same time, agents in Miami were preparing to raid one of Lam’s rented mansions. Lam knew it was coming: Immediately after Serrano’s arrest, Serrano’s girlfriend called to warn his co-conspirators. They then deleted their Telegram accounts and other incriminating evidence from their phones. Later that day, a team of F.B.I. agents working with the Miami police raided a mansion near Miami Shores. Agents blew open the front metal gate while another group entered by boat via a small saltwater canal in the rear. The sound of flashbangs rang in the neighborhood as the agents entered the home. Moments later, an agent escorted a handcuffed Lam, who wore a long-sleeve white top, maroon basketball shorts and sneakers, as smoke hung in the air, followed by at least five other people who were in the house with him. Serrano and Lam were charged with money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They face up to 20 years in prison for each charge. Exactly one month after the heist, the party was over. In Danbury, in the days and weeks after the kidnapping of the Chetals, Castrovinci and the police worked with federal investigators to build cases against the group from Florida. They obtained emergency access to the suspects’ phones, where they could view group chat exchanges and record the groups’ movements. They learned that the trip was organized and paid for in part by Angel Borrero, a 23-year-old from Miami who went by Chi Chi. In the group conversation, Borrero wrote to the others, “If this go good we out to Cali next,” which federal investigators took to mean the group was planning something else in California. The same day, Josue Alberto Romero, who used the nickname Sway, sent a message to the group: “Chichi we are more ready than ever.” The chats indicated that the group began coordinating as early as 7 a.m. and spent part of the afternoon surveilling the Chetals. By then, the authorities had established a motive: The men, the police believed, had targeted the Chetals to hold them ransom for the money their son had. Independent investigators think that at least one member of the group, Reynaldo (Rey) Diaz, who they say went by the alias Pantic, was a member of the Com; ZachXBT speculates that the thieves might have made themselves targets by sharing stories of their spending with other Com members. “You would think you commit a crime, you would shut up and keep to yourselves,” he says. “But they kind of have to compensate, showing off to their friends — who they think are their friends. But they might not be their friends.” On Aug. 27, Danbury police filed charges against the six suspects in the case: multiple counts of first-degree assault, first-degree kidnapping and reckless endangerment. Federal charges followed. On Sept. 24, a grand-jury indictment filed in Federal District Court in Connecticut charged the six Florida men with kidnapping, carjacking and conspiracy crimes. The six Florida men reflect a growing faction of the Com, those less interested in online schemes and more concerned with using brute force. Diaz was himself shot in Florida two years earlier when he was the target of a robbery attempt. In the F.B.I. affidavit, an agent said the Com regularly commits “brickings, shootings and firebomb attacks.” In 2022, according to reporting from Brian Krebs, an independent investigative journalist, a young man who went by the moniker Foreshadow was kidnapped and beaten by a rival SIM-swapping gang and held for a $200,000 ransom. In October 2023, a 22-year-old named Patrick McGovern-Allen of Egg Harbor Township, N.J., was sentenced to 13 years in prison for participating in violence-for-hire jobs after being contracted by a group of cybercriminals. Last November, it was reported that the chief executive of a Toronto-based crypto company was kidnapped and held for a $1 million ransom. A few weeks later, after a 13-year-old known as the Gen Z Quant Kid created a crypto coin and inflated its value, the crypto community responded by doxxing him and his family and, it is rumored, kidnapping his dog. In January this year, a founder of the French crypto company Ledger was kidnapped with his wife; the kidnappers mutilated his hand and demanded a multimillion-dollar ransom in cryptocurrency. But increasingly, people who have nothing to do with the Com are being targeted, says Nixon, the researcher. Some alleged Com members participate in what are known as harm groups, whose members coerce young women and girls into committing acts of self-harm and violence. Seven years ago, Nixon says, there were maybe a few dozen people in the Com worth being concerned about; today, there are thousands. “Right now,” she says, “we are seeing an evolution from disorganized crime to organized crime, and we are somewhere in the middle point of that.” The twin episodes — the crypto heist and the kidnapping — suggest that the complete lawlessness of Com members’ online lives allowed them to imagine that they could get away with similar exploits in the real world. “I don’t think they really learn,” ZachXBT says. “I’ve seen a lot of them, after they either get either arrested, have assets seized, et cetera — I see a lot of them go back to what they were doing before.” This year, five of the six Florida men pleaded guilty to federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges. They could face 15 years in prison. In a Hartford court in January, 19-year-old Michael Rivas apologized for his actions, calling them “dumb” and saying he was helping another man carry out a “vendetta,” although he didn’t elaborate. In February, a 22-year-old Georgia man named James Schwab was indicted in connection with the kidnapping plot. According to the federal criminal complaint, Schwab had an altercation with Veer Chetal in a Miami nightclub a month before the kidnapping, and he helped fund the plot and arrange transportation and lodging for the attackers. He pleaded not guilty. On March 25, ZachXBT posted a new message to his original thread on X chronicling his investigation into the stolen crypto. “Update: Wiz (Veer Chetal) was arrested,” he wrote. “Here is his mug shot.” The photo attached featured a young man in a white T-shirt with bushy hair, a dark beard, a downturned mouth and exhausted eyes. He bore little resemblance to the kid pictured on the Immaculate High School website. The charge listed in jail records is a federal misdemeanor offense but doesn’t specify what that offense is. According to ZachXBT, the stolen Bitcoin he traced to addresses belonging to Chetal is now in a wallet controlled by law enforcement. The matte gray Lamborghini Urus — the one that Sushil and Radhika Chetal were driving the day of the kidnapping — is still sitting as evidence in a secure police lot in Danbury. It’s the same Lamborghini their son once drove to school.

The idea of getting her eldest child a smartphone had long felt inevitable, said Daisy Greenwell. But by early last year, when her daughter was 8 years old, it filled her with dread. When she talked to other parents, “everyone universally said, ‘Yes, it’s a nightmare, but you’ve got no choice,’” recalled Ms. Greenwell, 41. She decided to test that. A friend, Clare Fernyhough, had shared her concerns about the addictive qualities of smartphones and the impact of social media on mental health, so they created a WhatsApp group to strategize. Then Ms. Greenwell, who lives in rural Suffolk, in the east of England, posted her thoughts on Instagram. “What if we could switch the social norm so that in our school, our town, our country, it was an odd choice to make to give your child a smartphone at 11,” she wrote. “What if we could hold off until they’re 14, or 16?” She added a link to the WhatsApp group. The post went viral. Within 24 hours the group was oversubscribed with parents clamoring to join. Today, more than 124,000 parents of children in more than 13,000 British schools have signed a pact created by Smartphone Free Childhood, the charity set up by Ms. Greenwell, her husband, Joe Ryrie, and Ms. Fernyhough. It reads: “Acting in the best interests of my child and our community, I will wait until at least the end of Year 9 before getting them a smartphone.” (Year 9 is equivalent to the American eighth grade.) The movement aligns with a broader shift in attitudes in Britain, as evidence mounts of the harms posed to developing brains by smartphone addiction and algorithm-powered social media. In one survey last year the majority of respondents — 69 percent — felt social media negatively affected children under 15. Nearly half of parents said they struggled to limit the time children spent on phones. Meanwhile the police and intelligence services have warned of a torrent of extreme and violent content reaching children online, a trend examined in the hit TV show Adolescence, in which a schoolboy is accused of murder after being exposed to online misogyny. It became Britain’s most watched show, and on Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with its creators in Downing Street, telling them he had watched it with his son and daughter. But he also said: “This isn’t a challenge politicians can simply legislate for.” Other governments in Europe have acted to curb children’s smartphone use. In February, Denmark announced plans to ban smartphones in schools, while France barred smartphones in elementary schools in 2018. Norway plans to enforce a minimum age on social media. So far Britain’s government has appeared wary of intervening. Josh MacAlister, a Labour lawmaker, attempted to introduce a legal requirement to make all schools in England smartphone free. But the bill was watered down after the government made clear it would not support a ban, arguing that principals should make the decision. Some parents feel the need to act is urgent, especially as technology companies, including Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and X, formerly Twitter, have ended fact-checking operations, which many experts say will allow misinformation and hate speech to flourish. “We don’t have years for things to change,” said Vicky Allen, 46, a mother from Henfield in southern England. “It does feel like it needs to be us.” She and a friend, Julia Cassidy, 46, successfully campaigned for their children's elementary school to limit phone use after Ms. Cassidy watched a Channel 4 documentary about smartphones in schools, and then came across Smartphone Free Childhood. Ms. Cassidy was going to give her son a phone when he turned 11, but said, “I’ve just done a very big U-turn.” Now, she plans to give him a phone that can be used only for calls and texts. The power of parents collectively delaying smartphones is key, Ms. Greenwell said, because it insulates children from peer pressure. “This problem isn’t that complicated,” she said. “If you have other people around you who are also doing the same thing, it’s actually amazingly, beautifully simple.” ‘Most people just want to keep their children safe’ On a recent Friday morning, dozens of parents gathered in the auditorium of Colindale Primary School in north London for a presentation by Nova Eden, a regional leader for Smartphone Free Childhood. She described startling data — that the average 12-year-old in Britain spends 21 hours a week on a smartphone, for example, and that 76 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds spend most of their free time on screens. She also talked about emerging research on the impact of smartphone use. Ms. Eden cited studies showing rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm among teenagers spiking dramatically since social media was introduced. “These children are struggling and they need our help,” Ms. Eden said. “I know how hard it is, but we need to be the ones that stand up and say, this is not good for you.” Ms. Eden, 44, described struggling to find the right balance for her own children, ages 5, 10 and 13. She said it was the campaigning of Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life after viewing suicide-related content on Instagram and other social media sites, that drove her to get involved. She had just given her own 13-year-old a phone. “At that time, I was going through this with my child, and seeing the change in him and his friends,” she said. Jane Palmer, the principal of the Colindale school, acknowledged that some parents have been skeptical of limiting smartphone use, or of banning the devices from school entirely, as her school will do from September. Some argue the devices can provide social independence and allow them to contact their children in an emergency. Others feel parental controls go far enough in ensuring safety online. But the conversations among parents had begun to make way for change, Ms. Palmer said. During the presentation, she described how a former student had died by suicide after being bullied online. “It can be tricky, and of course not everyone is going to support it,” she said of the ban. “But at the end of the day, I think most people just want to keep their children safe.” Colindale is in the borough of Barnet, which in February announced plans to become the first borough in Britain to ban smartphones in all its public schools. The initiative will affect some 63,000 children. Eton, one of Britain’s most elite private schools, announced last year that new students would be banned from bringing smartphones and would instead be issued with Nokia handsets that can only text and make calls. In Suffolk, the founders of the Smartphone Free Childhood initiative are aware that their success in attracting parents to their cause is partly thanks to social media and messaging apps on which they have spread the word. “There are loads of positive things about this technology,” Mr. Ryrie said. “We’re not trying to say that technology is bad, just that we need to have a conversation as a society about when it’s appropriate for children to have unrestricted access to this stuff.”

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, and Tom Alison, one of his top lieutenants, were discussing how they wanted to reshape Facebook for the future of social networking. Mr. Zuckerberg, who had grown Facebook from a dorm room project to a $1.5 trillion company that he renamed Meta, wanted to bring back some of the original rationale for the social network, or what he called “OG Facebook” vibes, Mr. Alison said in an interview. After years of adding features, the executives felt that some of Facebook’s key functions were being drowned out. So they asked themselves: Why not try building some features that resembled the Facebook of yore a bit more? On Thursday, Meta did just that with a simple tweak. The company said the Facebook app would now include a separate news feed for users that featured posts shared exclusively by people’s friends and family. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The feature, called the Friends Tab, will replace a tab in the app that showed new friend requests or suggested friends. Friends Tab will instead show a scrolling feed of posts, such as photos, video stories, text, birthday notifications and friend requests. For now, it will be available to Facebook users only in the United States and Canada. “This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media,” said Mr. Alison, who is head of the Facebook app. “We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.” The new feed is a sharp departure from the way social media has evolved over the past decade. The rise of apps like TikTok habituated users to seeing posts in their feeds from influencers and content creators, who were often people they had never met. Other companies followed suit. Meta’s apps, which also include Instagram, began leaning more heavily on recommended content to keep people engaged for longer periods. Now people view apps like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok as something more akin to television — a lean-back experience fueled by a smaller number of creators who produce hours of entertainment for the rest of the internet to consume. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Not everyone has welcomed the shift. When Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, it was aimed at helping college students connect with their friends on campus. As the app grew more popular, it became about helping every user keep up to date with posts from friends and family. So when Mr. Zuckerberg announced in 2022 that Meta would insert recommended content on Facebook from people who were not connected to the user, many users revolted. Many initially found the recommended content — which relied on artificial intelligence to surface suggestions — jarring. After some criticism, Mr. Zuckerberg slightly scaled back the amount of such content added into people’s Facebook feeds. Still, that did not stop Meta from embracing algorithmically recommended content. In recent years, more of people’s feeds on Facebook and Instagram became dominated by creators, businesses and brands. Recommended content like Reels, Meta’s video product, led people to spend more time on the apps, the company has said. Meta has no plans to stop adding recommended content to users’ feeds, Mr. Alison said in the interview. For now, the company does not expect the Friends Tab to be more popular than the Home feed of recommended content. And more changes to Facebook are likely coming. Meta plans to introduce other features and updates to Facebook in the coming year to make social media still “feel social,” Mr. Alison said. “It is, frankly, core to Facebook,” he said.

On Jan. 18, I was one of millions of Americans scrolling through TikTok when service for the all-you-can-binge video buffet suddenly halted just before a federal government ban went into effect. It was a breathtaking moment that had me in mourning. Where will I go now, I wondered, for my daily dose of Hollywood gossip, video game news and anime updates? TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, and had run up against a legal deadline to find a U.S. owner or face a ban, came back to life the next day. President Trump then quickly signed an executive order extending the window for TikTok’s sale to April 5. With that new deadline fast approaching, the fate of TikTok, which claims more than 170 million American users, remains uncertain. But at least for now, a repeat of January’s blackout appears unlikely. Last month, Mr. Trump told reporters that he could extend the deadline again. And while ByteDance hasn’t confirmed any plans to sell, Oracle, the data center company, and others have emerged as potential suitors. The latest deadline offers an opportune moment to reflect on the app’s role in society. Here’s what I found. TikTok is still the best short video app TikTok started out 11 years ago as Musical.ly, an app for users to post lip-sync videos, but over time it evolved into a general-purpose video app where people could scroll through short clips of news and entertainment. It now has more than one billion users globally. In the last five years, as TikTok surged in popularity worldwide, Meta, Google and others produced clones that let users endlessly scroll through video clips. But younger users still prefer TikTok for watching short videos, according to a survey by eMarketer, a research firm. The preference for TikTok may be linked, in part, to the quality of the product. Videos made on TikTok generally look better — clearer, more tightly edited and catchy — than videos produced with similar apps like Instagram’s Reels. (Why drink a tepid cola when you can have classic Coke?) TikTok’s tools, including the editing app CapCut, streamline production of videos for the app. For me, when TikTok was briefly down, switching to Reels felt maddening. Many users posted videos that felt incomplete, such as a video of sourdough bread that asked me to read the caption to learn how to bake the perfect loaf. Why not just explain it in the video instead of a caption written in tiny text? Meta, which owns Instagram, is playing catch-up to TikTok’s editing tools. An Instagram spokeswoman referred to the company’s announcement of Edits, a competitor to CapCut for editing Reels videos, which is expected to debut in the coming weeks. The tool will allow Instagram users to upload video in a higher resolution, which will improve picture quality, among other perks. TikTok’s secret sauce, which others have also not replicated, is its algorithm for determining what video people want to see next. Many have said in surveys that TikTok is more attuned to surfacing the types of videos they want to watch, about everything from meal ideas to video games, keeping them glued to their screens for hours a day. Mental health concerns are mounting TikTok’s effectiveness at keeping people scrolling has been a topic of widespread concern among parents and academic researchers who wonder whether people could be considered addicted to the app, similar to video game addiction. Studies on the topic are continuing and remain inconclusive. One, published last year and led by Christian Montag, a professor of cognitive and brain sciences at the University of Macau in China, examined TikTok overuse. Very few people in the study, which involved 378 participants of various ages, reported feeling addicted to TikTok. Yet broadly speaking, the consensus from multiple studies on TikTok and other social media apps is that younger people are more likely to report feeling addicted, Dr. Montag said in an interview. “I think children should not at all be on these platforms,” he said about TikTok and similar apps. People’s brains can take at least 20 years to mature and self regulate, he added. A TikTok spokeswoman said the app included tools for people to manage their screen time, including a new setting for parents to block TikTok from working on their children’s phones during certain hours of the day. It’s a growing marketing platform for brands TikTok has become a major hub for businesses to promote their products through posted videos and wares sold through the TikTok Shop, an in-app store. The company is working hard to make Americans aware of its impact on the economy, running a splashy advertising campaign in newspapers and billboards portraying itself as a champion of small businesses. A TikTok spokeswoman cited a study claiming that TikTok drove $15 billion in revenue for small businesses in 2023, a figure that should be taken with a grain of salt because TikTok commissioned the study. But it’s clear just from scrolling through TikTok that many brands enjoy using it to spread videos demonstrating their quirky products. I confess that TikTok videos prompted me to buy an overpriced tool for removing dog fur from car seats and an automatic scrubber for cleaning the kitchen sink. As for so-called creators, the influencers posting TikTok videos that often go viral, the platform is typically more useful for self-promotion than for making money, said Alyssa McKay, an actress in New Jersey with more than 10 million TikTok followers. A video that gets two million views could earn her a few dollars, she said. That’s because TikTok pays only for views coming from people who do not already follow you, she added. It’s still a national security concern TikTok was banned in the first place because American government officials worry that ByteDance could share the data it has collected on its American users with the Chinese government for espionage purposes. Those concerns culminated in a Supreme Court hearing in January, where the Biden administration made its case for banning the app, citing concerns that TikTok could create a new pathway for Chinese intelligence services to infiltrate American infrastructure. But officials did not present evidence that TikTok was connected to such threats. TikTok has, however, been linked to smaller data scandals in the United States. TikTok confirmed in 2022 that four of its employees had been fired for using the app to snoop on several journalists in an effort to track down their sources. A TikTok spokeswoman referred to a video explaining how the app safeguards data of American users in a server system protected by Oracle, the U.S. database giant it teamed up with, to prevent unauthorized foreign access. Matthew Green, a security researcher and an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said the U.S. government’s security concerns about TikTok were exaggerated since no major scandal had surfaced yet but also valid because the hypothetical harms could happen. Plenty of apps made by American companies collect and share our information with data brokers, the firms that sell insights about us to marketers, including some in China. But TikTok, in particular, can collect sensitive data about Americans that would be useful for an adversarial government, such as their address books, Dr. Green added. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We’re leaking so much information that you don’t need TikTok to make things worse, but things do get worse when you have millions and millions of different phones running this app,” Dr. Green said.

Hugues Oyarzabal, one of Europe’s most accomplished surfers and among the first to record spectacular feats from inside the curl of a wave using digital cameras, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Biarritz, France. He was 39. His parents, Charles and Lucette Oyarzabal, said he had taken his own life. Friends told The New York Times that Oyarzabal had lived with bipolar disorder from childhood. “His physical and psychological suffering took its toll,” his parents told The Times through a translator. “He has chosen to leave us, to rediscover the peace and serenity he has been unable to find over the last few years.” Oyarzabal surfed some of the most challenging waves in the world, from the Basque coasts of northern Spain and southwestern France to Southern Africa and beyond. In his later years, he found what he called “a second home” in Indonesia, spending part of every year there and seeking out spots that had rarely, if ever, been surfed, notably at Desert Point, on Lombok island, east of Bali, and at Uluwatu, on the Bukit Peninsula. He also made acclaimed surfing documentaries, including “Peace and Left,” a multipart series, its title referring to a “left-hand wave,” one that breaks to the left from a surfer’s perspective. Oyarzabal began videotaping his surfing exploits in 2001, as a teenager, using a Mini-DV camcorder in a waterproof box attached to his board. He captured images of himself riding through “tubes” or “barrels” — the tunnels of air created inside cresting waves, which the greatest surfers can ride in for hundreds of yards. He is believed to have been the first to film himself inside a barrel, and to photograph and videotape himself looking backward through one. He later moved on to more sophisticated GoPro digital cameras as they came on the market. In December 2012, when he was 26, he was invited to Hawaii to be honored at the first-ever GoPro Awards ceremony. The American surfer Kelly Slater, an 11-time world champion, presented him with an award for his photography and video work. One “selfie” image captured him inside the tube of a wave in Skeleton Bay, Namibia. Nowadays, extreme sports athletes, from big wave surfers to mountain climbers, commonly use GoPro or other point-of-view cameras, placing them all over their bodies or on their equipment. Oyarzabal is thought to be the first surfer to create a device that clamped a camera to his teeth, affording the most direct point of view of a surfer. His surfing friends variously described him as idiosyncratic, unpredictable, manic, lovable and loyal. Hugues Oyarzabal (roughly pronounced OO-geh oy-ar-ZAH-bahl) was born on March 7, 1985, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a fishing port in the Basque region of southwestern France. He grew up in the village of Biriatou, on the French side of the river Bidassoa. When he began surfing in Indonesia, he added another first name, Waian (Balinese for “firstborn son”). It led to his logo, WHO (for Waian Hugues Oyarzabal), which he used on his website and in photographs. At elementary school in Biriatou, Hugues excelled at tennis and paleta, a court sport similar to pelota, in which a leather bat or glove is used to smack a ball against a wall. But at age 11 he fell in love with surfing, starting in the Bay of Biscay on the Basque coast. During high school in Hendaye, near his home, he surfed some of the most formidable waves off Basque beaches. One beach, Belharra, on the French Basque coast, was the scene of rare but violent waves that were considered unsurfable, known to have swallowed up many a fishing boat. But Oyarzabal took on the challenge and succeeded. (The surf was later calmed by a breakwater.) His passion for surfing became so consuming that he left school at 16 and, financed by his understanding parents, moved to the Sunshine Coast of Australia to enroll in a sports and education program under a private coach, who improved his surfing and his English. For the rest of his life, Oyarzabal considered himself a so-called freesurfer, unbound by the need to compete and instead content to be at one with the waves, performing unique feats that became famous among the global surfing community. “I’m always looking to try different things,” he told the Britain-based Surf Europe magazine in 2006. “I hate the idea of having a surf routine.” In Australia, he met Jana Kondo, who returned with him to France, where they were married in 2006. They traveled to surfing beaches around the world. In 2011, they had a daughter, Kailani, meaning “sea and sky” in Hawaiian, and Oyarzabal later taught her to surf. She is now an accomplished surfer in her own right. The marriage ended in divorce in 2013. Oyarzabal’s daughter and parents are his only immediate survivors. After his death, about 100 surfers gave Oyarzabal a Hawaiian-style farewell by paddling out from Hendaye, close to his home, to scatter flowers on the water. Half a world away, fellow surfers in Indonesia did the same.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. It’s never been more clear that the Democratic Party—both activist and rank-and-file wings alike—is spoiling for a fight. The broad feistiness within the party exploded last week after Chuck Schumer helped Republicans pass a nakedly partisan spending plan over the objection of the majority of his fellow Democratic Senators. The moment is giving prominent Democrats their best chance yet to provide their own vision for dragging their party out of its current state of almost-total irrelevance. The dynamic seems like it is coasting toward a satisfying release of pent-up pressure. It also may matter for naught. The latest polls confirm this is a crisis moment for Democrats. Their brand is at an all-time low. Just 29% of all Americans have a positive view of the party, a 20-point swing from January 2021 when Trump was leaving office and Joe Biden was moving into the White House, according to polling released this week from CNN. Just 63% of Democrats hold positive views of their party. But what’s most revealing is what the party faithful want to see out of its leaders. A whopping 57% of Democrats say their party needs to mainly work to block Republicans’ agenda, a shift from 23% of the same segment who wanted opposition to be the central goal during the first year of Trump’s term. To be clear, this is not 2017, and the current fight is taking on an entirely different shade of contempt. The Resistance may not be showing up like it did for Trump’s first term; that does not mean a more muscular opposition lacks a constituency. There’s no reason to think that this give-’em-hell sentiment is temporary. Those CNN numbers are from a poll taken in the days before almost a dozen Senate Democrats, led by Schumer, helped Republicans avoid a government shutdown. The boiling debate over that fracturing vote is now driving the conversation over how Democrats should move forward. For the party’s leading voices—many of them hopefuls in the 2028 shadow presidential primary—their answer to the Schumer Rorschach test may take on outsized weight. Take Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has been not-so-subtly making the pre-2028 rounds. On Tuesday, he stopped by the Center For American Progress for the first of that think tank’s sessions helping navigate the second Trump era. When given a chance to back up Schumer’s vote that kept the government’s lights on facing a midnight deadline at the end of last week, Pritzker took a pass. “Look, he’s the elected Leader,” Pritzker said. “I disagree with what he did and vehemently so. But I also know that he has done good work as a Senate Leader in other ways.” It was artful evasion that might serve him well in town halls up in New Hampshire, where he is already a familiar face in the state that historically held the first-in-the-nation primary and where he will headline the state Democratic Party’s biggest fundraiser next month. The counterpoint to Pritzker’s light touch on Schumer is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been merciless in her disapproval of Schumer’s decision. Even before Schumer made his alliance with the GOP spending plan official, she was having talks with fellow Democrats about putting in motion a primary challenge against her fellow New Yorker in 2028. Even centrist and middling Democrats were suddenly interested in what a Sen. AOC would look like. Across the political spectrum, there was a sincere uneasiness about how Democrats were moving forward. Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland so far is alone in openly calling for Schumer to exit, but he is likely to find companions if things continue apace. Once the run-of-the-mill lawmakers’ consultants can show them polling to prove this isn’t a risky footing, expect plenty of others to follow. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, is working to broaden his base in ways that are either canny or clumsy; the verdict is still out. He urged Senate Democrats to shut the government down rather than give Republicans the win on a spending plan that made deep cuts, but also defended his recent chummy conversation with conservative insiders like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. “I think we all agreed after the last election that it’s important for Democrats to explore new and unique ways of talking to people,” Newsom told supporters by email. (Perhaps that stance is why, according to a new book, Trump was terrified to face the California Governor if he were to have replaced Biden on the ticket last year.) For those liberals who’ve already unfollowed Newsom on Bluesky, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz may be more their speed. As Republicans are shutting down town halls to avoid angry constituents, Walz is backfilling with a tour of House districts with Republican incumbents. On the topic of Senate Democrats and shutting down the government, Walz recently put the issue to an Omaha audience, “I get the overwhelming feeling that the vast majority of people wish they would have voted no. Is that true?” The audience erupted with applause. But Walz, who has proven to be a much better player when given a free hand to campaign as he sees best, stayed firmly in the lane of pragmatists. “Chuck understands and what folks understand is that a shutdown comes at a hell of a price,” Walz told the local NPR affiliate. That approach also came through during an earlier Walz stop in Des Moines, where he seemed to suggest the search for the party’s next leader is a pointless one. “There is not going to be a charismatic leader ride in and do this. It is going to be people coming out on a beautiful Friday afternoon, demanding change and holding people accountable.” There is no shortage of others whose recent moves seem less focused on steering the party forward, and more about claiming their space on 2028 bingo cards. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore headlined a white-tie dinner with Washington insiders just this weekend, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg last week passed on a Senate run in Michigan, and no one is taking their eye off Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, or former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. Then there’s former Vice President Kamala Harris, the substitute for Biden late in the 2024 race who is telling everyone asking that she is likely to make a call on a 2028 race by the end of the summer. All of this is feeding the still-in-the-womb 2028 background rumbling inside the opposition party that is sharply divided over just how much capital-O opposing needs to be done, and to what ends. Trump will remain a driving force for the foreseeable future. Unlike Republicans, who this week telegraphed that they were ready to stay the course for 2028 when they made Vice President J.D. Vance the Republican National Committee’s chief fundraiser, the Democrats do not have a unified understanding of how to handle the coming months, let alone the midterms or 2028. If they do not find a general map, their time in the wilderness will continue to be completely dictated by Trump and his allies. But as the internal bickering drags on, all weary voters are seeing is a party with no shortage of talk about fighting Trump, but without a steady notion of how to actually do it.

Last spring, when my wife and I were preparing to welcome our first child, we started a list of baby gear — a rite of passage for parents. The difference with our list, or so I thought, was that it would contain only the best stuff because it was vetted by me, a tech columnist with 20 years of experience testing products. After our baby arrived in the summer, I learned I was wrong. It turns out there is no best baby gear, because what worked for other parents often didn’t work for us. Even though I had picked a top-rated stroller, its wheels were inadequate for our neighborhood’s pothole-riddled streets. The electronic bottle warmer listed as a must-have by many Redditors was too slow at heating up milk for our vocal newborn. The Snoo, the $1,700 robotic bassinet with a cult following, did nothing to lull our little one to sleep. Now past the sleepless nights of the newborn phase, my wife and I wound up with a well-rested, content child. What helped, in part, was pivoting to a different approach with baby gear, analyzing our particular problems as new parents and looking for ways to solve them. My highs and lows with baby tech may not be every parent’s experience. But the lessons I learned from my misadventures, from internet-controlled night lights to nanny cams, should be universally applicable. Here’s what to know. Knowledge triumphs over fancy gizmos, including Snoo When our daughter was first born, she snoozed effortlessly in a no-frills bassinet I bought from another parent through Facebook Marketplace. But when she turned about 3 months old, she began loudly protesting naps. That made me consider the Snoo, the chicly designed white bassinet that automatically sways and plays sounds to soothe a fussy baby. Among parents, the Snoo is a polarizing product not just because of its price ($1,700, or $160 a month for rental). Several of my friends with the privilege of owning one called the device a godsend that saved them from the brink of insanity. Others said their child hated it. I had read the book about soothing newborns written by the Snoo’s creator, Harvey Karp, so I wanted to give it a shot. Fortunately, a friend lent me a Snoo. I downloaded a companion app and paid a $20 subscription for access to some of its extra perks, including a rocking motion that mimicked the bumps and jostles of riding in a car. My baby was initially unfazed when we strapped her in. But when she started crying and the bassinet reacted by swaying and playing white noise, she cried even louder. After a few weeks of experimenting, we reverted to her old-school bassinet. A spokeswoman for Happiest Baby, the company behind Snoo, said it was ideal to acclimate babies to the product as soon as they were born because it simulates the movements and sounds a baby experiences inside a mother’s womb. However, the company advertises Snoo as suitable for babies up to 6 months of age, and my daughter fit this criterion. Editors’ Picks Kristen Stewart Thinks the Critics at Cannes Are Being Too Nice These Boomer Radicals in Vermont Just Want to Be ‘Good Progressives’ How to Manage Your Blood Sugar With Exercise The tech that eventually helped? E-books. One late night, I downloaded a $14 e-book by a pediatrician about infant psychology and sleep. I began to understand why my 3-month-old was fighting sleep and how to anticipate when she would need a nap. We tried the book’s methods, and within a few weeks my baby began napping regularly and sleeping through the night. Knowledge is more powerful — and cheaper to access — than a fancy bassinet. The best tech helped parents with broken brains My wife and I found the most useful baby tech to be smartphone apps that helped us process information in our sleep-deprived state. The free app Huckleberry, a tool for parents to log bottle feedings, diaper changes and sleep durations for their babies, was crucial for my wife and me to communicate the baby’s needs with each other when we took turns working shifts. It also provided useful data for our pediatrician. Also helpful was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s free Milestones app, which shows a checklist of a child’s expected developmental milestones at each age, such as learning to roll at 6 months. When she was about 7 months old, our daughter began to crawl. We could no longer take our eyes off her, so we shifted to consuming more parenting literature through a different medium: audiobooks. Single-task baby tech is unnecessary Lots of popular baby tech are gadgets that serve a single purpose. The $60 Hatch Rest, a night light that plays white noise, is a product on many parents’ lists of must-haves for helping babies sleep. The $250 Nanit Pro, a webcam that can alert you to a baby’s movements and cries, is another. So is the $50 Philips Avent electronic bottle warmer, which heats up a bottle of refrigerated milk with the press of a button in a few minutes. I received all of those products as gifts through our registry. Though I liked using them, I ultimately realized other products I already owned could accomplish the same tasks. The Nanit webcam had an impressive set of features for monitoring our baby, including a tool that automatically detected what time I put her to bed and what time she woke up. But that feature required the camera to be mounted on a tall tripod against a wall to get a bird’s-eye view of the crib, which was unfeasible with the layout of our bedroom. We used the Nanit just like any webcam for periodically checking on the video feed of our child in her crib. That could also be done with any general-purpose security camera, like the $100 indoor Nest Cam. Our baby slept better in pitch dark, so the Hatch Rest’s night light, the colors of which can be changed through a smartphone app, proved unhelpful. (Maybe when our daughter is older she will appreciate that the light can be set on a timer so it illuminates when it’s time for her to wake up.) We used only the feature for playing white noise. When we traveled, we used a tablet or smartphone to play white noise in the hotel room, making a dedicated sound machine superfluous. The Philips Avent bottle warmer initially seemed useful, but every caregiver for our daughter, including relatives, my wife, myself and now our nanny, stopped using it. We each independently realized that a metal coffee mug partly filled with hot water from the sink was faster. This is not to say that any of the aforementioned products won’t work well for another parent. But the problem with the premise of the best baby gear is that it requires any two infants to be alike, which is rarely the case. It’s best to start with getting to know your baby before starting a list, rather than the other way around.

Within a modern but nondescript building a few hundred feet from Stockholm’s pretty Riddarfjarden Bay, a frosted glass wall in Josef Fares’s office displays etched characters from It Takes Two, his video game studio’s “Toy Story”-esque cooperative adventure about an adult couple’s broken relationship. Near his desk, in a lighted case, sits a pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves. “I can relate, you know, to someone who’s speaking his mind,” Fares said. In an industry where executives have become mired in tech marketing-speak and can be as protected by publicists as Hollywood stars are, Fares stands out. Many gamers know the garrulous designer for his appearance at the glitzy Game Awards in 2017, when he twice dismissed the Oscars with a swear word before raising his middle finger to the camera. The sentiment could come as a shock from a person who began his artistic career as a moviemaker, including an autobiographical coming-of-age film set during the Lebanese civil war that was Sweden’s entry for best international feature at the Oscars in 2006. But for the past dozen years, Fares’s passion has been video games, especially cooperative experiences that can be played on the couch with a sibling, partner, child or friend. Fares enjoyed games from the moment he played Pong on an Atari 2600 while living in Beirut; he fell in love in 1988 when he experienced Super Mario Bros. in Stockholm. After working with a few students to make a game demo in 2009, Fares got excited. That very night he came up with the concept of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, about siblings working together in a time of crisis. His interest in movies dwindled. “It’s like falling in love with something I can’t quit,” Fares, 47, said. “There’s not a single day in my life that I don’t think about video games.” During an era of faceless online gaming, Fares has shown time and time again that there is still a market for the communal experience. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013) became an essential part of the indie game revolution. Hazelight, the studio he began afterward, found immediate success with A Way Out (2018), a cooperative prison-escape experience, and then sold nearly 23 million copies of It Takes Two (2021). Hazelight’s newest game, Split Fiction, is a rocket-fast roller coaster ride of science fiction, fantasy and collegiality that has received critical praise. During the game’s eight chapters, which can be played online, two daring scribes travel to fantastical, sometimes surreal environments. Fares said there was usually one key word from which a game blossoms. For Brothers, it was “sorrow.” For Split Fiction, it was “friendship.” Neil Druckmann, the studio director of Naughty Dog whose credits include Uncharted and The Last of Us, called Fares a “high-energy dude” and a “confident artist” who wanted to try things no one had done. He likened Fares’s work to making music. “There’s a little bit of, like, a hip-hop to it, you know, where you’re kind of sampling these ideas,” Druckmann said. “But he’s making them his own.” There are regular nods to pop culture and gaming history in Split Fiction, including “Dune,” Crash Bandicoot and Mario Kart. There is both “The Lord of the Rings” and The Legend of Zelda. The list goes on. In one sequence, Fares borrows a little from the movies “Shrek” and “Babe.” As you control a pig that flies by passing gas, colorful confetti, white stars and a rainbow emerge from the porcine behind. Fares’s personality is regularly described as “eccentric” or “crazy,” and he even pokes fun at his persona. The video of his Oscars outburst — in which he highlighted how video games are an interactive experience — is an Easter egg in It Takes Two. But on a recent video call, Fares, dressed in a beige, cable-stitched sweater, was reflective. Sitting on a beige couch in Hazelight’s office with his feet up on the cushions, he explained how his parents had tried to emigrate to Sweden from Beirut five times before their application was approved. They were eager to get their six children to a peaceful environment far away from the constant bombings of Lebanon’s civil war, which took 150,000 lives and created a million refugees between 1975 and 1990. “The first 10 years of my life was very violent and very harsh,” said Fares, who added that the formative experience built his self-assurance. In 2005, Fares documented his childhood in the midst of war through “Zozo,” a movie that depicted bombs exploding, apartments blowing up and lives eliminated. Oddly but effectively, a shellshocked child befriends a chick he finds on his rooftop. Fares himself had a chicken as a pet, a friend he could talk to amid the real-life devastation he witnessed. When he left it with older chickens, the chick was attacked and killed. “It was traumatic,” he said, a terribly disquieting moment. Several of Fares’s other movies featured his brother, Fares Fares, an actor who went on to appear in the television series “Tyrant,” “Westworld” and “The Wheel of Time.” And as he did with “Zozo,” also Fares’s nickname, he has placed portions of his life in Hazelight’s games, sometimes bravely. At the end of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, there is an emotional burial. “I actually buried my own little brother,” Fares said. “He died in his birth. So he was still a baby. And for some reason, me and my sister went to bury him.” It is here that Fares talked quietly about the need for family and friends. All of Hazelight’s games are cooperative endeavors, played best with two people sitting near each other on the couch. The studio tries to balance its desire for challenging gameplay with its concern of causing too much strife, and the automatic save points in Split Fiction come frequently. “We build up a super hard trust between two people,” Fares said. “And then you all of a sudden, you might trash it and you might have to go against each other. There’s something interesting about that to create this kind of tension between two people.” Earlier in the day, before work, Fares had driven his two young daughters to school. He was now readying to pick them up. Mio and Zoe, the two characters in Split Fiction, are named after his children, he said, “so I can have them with me even when I’m working.” In the game, Mio is introverted and Zoe is extroverted; unlike his children, they do not immediately care for each other’s company. Early on, after each voices a distaste for the other’s favored writing genre, the authors are forced to jump from one moving space vehicle to another, all while under attack. The scene is backed by a sci-fi soundtrack with high-tension synths by the musician Gustaf Grefberg, who has scored all of Hazelight’s games. Grefberg believed in Fares’s vision as soon as he saw a prototype of Brothers. “I begged Josef to work with him,” Grefberg said. Moved by Fares’s excitement and confidence, Grefberg wanted to join a team that had so many new ideas. An annual game jam at Hazelight known as “Freaky Week” generates free-flowing ideas from across the 83-person company. Beyond Fares’s intensity — “When Josef says he wants more action, he says it as if it’s almost like an emotional word,” Grefberg said — he is deeply philosophical. The colleagues have had wide-ranging conversations about the meaning of meditation, Zen concepts and spirituality. That does not mean Fares has lost his ambition. He may even return to filmmaking, if he can find the time. “I believe Split Fiction could potentially be a great movie,” he said. The game already has audiences transfixed.