A lawsuit filed this week in California reopens a wound that has apparently been buried for years. The man at the center of it was once a child actor, a kid trying to make it in an industry where access, charm, and investment from powerful adults can change everything. Now, as an adult, he has stepped out of anonymity to say that the person who promised him opportunities instead took something he could never get back. The lawsuit names Sean “Diddy” Combs, but it does not stop there. It also targets the agents who were supposed to protect him. According…

It’s Election Day in America, and inside a polling station in Washington D.C., voters are filing in with quiet determination, masks and stickers, folding chairs in corridors, and the low hum of democracy doing its most patient work. Photographers from international news agencies capture the ordinary ritual: hands reaching for ballots, booths with curtains drawn, clipboards and blue pens. But just outside that scene, and increasingly inside the national conversation, a very different kind of election drama is unfolding. The 2022 U.S. midterms are happening alongside a booming, deeply controversial ecosystem of prediction markets—online platforms where people wager real money…