Jia Tolentino Makes Sense Out of This Nonsense Moment
A profile.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Decisions"
Current near-misses, haunting memories.
The Man Who Built the Retweet: “We Handed a Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds”
The button that ruined the internet—and how to fix it.
How Scorned Women and a Casanova Cop Caught L.A.’s ‘Dine-and-Dash Dater’
In Los Angeles, a serial “dine and dash dater” scammed his online dates into buying him expensive dinners. When the women team up with Detective “Casanova” of the Pasadena Police Department, they finally made him pay.
The Suicide Catcher
The angel saving jumpers on an infamous bridge in China.
Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.
“I’ve noticed that the times I’m extra susceptible to being on social media is when I am feeling personally insecure or when I’m dealing with existential dread. That within itself is not part of the attention economy - that’s just a human being having feelings and reacting to things. For me, it’s a question of like, ’What do I do with that?’ I can either feed it back into the attention economy and actually get more of it back - more anxiety or more existential dread - or I can go in this other direction and spend time alone or with people who care about the same things. Those are places where I can bring my feelings and they won’t destroy me.”
Thanks to Mailchimp, Substack, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge
He was a Harvard Law professor who taught a class on judgment, which made him an unlikely target for an elaborate paternity scheme that nearly cost him his house and family.
The Fall of Mic Was a Warning
Lessons from the death of a venture-backed, Facebook-dependent, millennial-focused news site.
Just Some Kids from Northeast Ohio
At LeBron James’ I Promise School.
Last Woman Standing
Shari Redstone sits atop a $30 billion media empire.
When the River Rises
In a few short hours, a normal evening along Texas’s Blanco River became the site of a deadly flash flood.
The Crane Wife
On calling off a wedding, and studying whooping cranes.
Sir Dyno's Deal with the Devil
How a Northern Californian rapper ended up facing life after being hired to produce a CD titled Generations of United Norteños – Till Eternity that may have served as a recruiting tool for the prison gang Nuestra Familia.
The Perfect Fire
It started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with temperatures above 3,000 degrees and the men of the Worcester Fire Department in a fight for their lives.
Water's Edge
On Bill May, considered to be the greatest male synchronized swimmer who ever lived, and his long quest for Olympic gold.
Is It Okay to Laugh at the Florida Man?
On what it’s like to go viral and the moral complications of laughing along.
Andy Ngo Has the Newest New Media Career. It's Made Him a Victim and a Star.
“Look out at Twitter, at YouTube, at cable news. Behold a whole precarious world of media hopefuls swarming every bitter inch of the culture war, filming angry Americans, filming each other, filming themselves, grimly determined to find or frame a few seconds of a reality to sell.”
The Call of the Drums
A journey to explore the rising authoritarianism in Hungary and its weirdest fringe: the people who believe they’ve descended from Attila the Hun.
The Village Where Every Cop Has Been Convicted of Domestic Violence
Dozens of convicted criminals have been hired as cops in Alaska communities. Often, they are the only applicants. In Stebbins, every cop has a criminal record, including the chief.
Perhaps the Best Dinosaur Fossil Ever Discovered. So Why Has Hardly Anyone Seen It?
A Montana rancher found two skeletons in combat—the Dueling Dinosaurs. But who do they belong to, and will the public ever see them?
Where the Bodies Are Buried
In 1910, East Texas saw one of America’s deadliest post-Reconstruction racial purges. One survivor’s descendants have waged an uphill battle for generations to unearth that violent past.
The New Prospectors
Every year, members of the Gold Prospectors Association of America pack up their RVs in search of adventure, friendship, and a bucketful of pay dirt.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Four Crônicas"
Examinations of literature, philosophy, and the self.
I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.
The author teaches a college class about what it means to be white in America, but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.
Josh Levin is the national editor at Slate. He is the host of the podcast Hang Up and Listen and the author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth.
“I think it’s a strength to make a thing, one that people might have thought was familiar, feel strange. And reminding people - in general, in life - that you don’t really know as much as you think you know. I think that carries over into any kind of storytelling.”
Thanks to Mailchimp, Squarespace and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
