Weekender: Lonely Superfans, UV Medicine and Vine’s Rise and Fall

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Brazen Weekender! This is Bradley Hope, your loyal servant, and this is the newsletter where I share what the team has been watching, reading and listening to this week.

Just a quick note: producing Whale Hunting every week—along with the Weekender and our special projects like the Unofficial Rich List—which restarts next week!—takes serious time, resources, and a bit of obsession. We’ve got big plans ahead: deeper investigations, more global reach, and sharper intel for those trying to understand how real power moves.

To make that happen, we’re shifting toward a mostly paywalled model. Some editions will still be free—especially the ones that draw in new readers—but the majority of our reporting, data dives, and team picks will now be for paid subscribers.

If you’ve gotten value from our work, this is the moment to support it. Subscribing helps us fund more reporting and devote more time to making Whale Hunting the sharpest intelligence briefing of its kind.

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Thanks for reading, and for being part of the hunt.

-- Bradley and the whole Brazen team

📺 First up, here’s what we’ve been watching this week

The Ballad of Wallis Island (Film, 2025) – A quirky British dramedy about a reclusive lottery winner who pays his favorite folk duo to reunite for a private island concert. What sounds like the setup to a joke becomes, in director James Griffiths’ hands, a “funny but also melancholy piece of work.” Tim Key brings awkward charm to the lonely superfan host, while Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan (as the semi-famous folk exes) give the musical reunion real heart. The film is more interested in sincere emotion than sketch comedy, and it shows – Basden’s original songs are played straight and cut unexpectedly deep. In UK cinemas from May 30, this pleasant-yet-poignant yarn will leave you misty-eyed and humming.

Paid subscribers can get access to the rest of our team recommendations and our deep dives like last week's extraordinary tale of the crypto fraudster Victor Su and his ties to Chinese organized crime.

Also, heads up – our Unofficial Rich List begins again next week with a female fleeing kleptocrat ... First three people with correct guesses gets a free Brazen or Whale Hunting t-shirt. Write me here: bradley@projectbrazen.com.