League on Fire
The curious rise and spectacular crash of the Alliance of American Football, a new league that went under in just eight weeks.
Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number. Her latest essay collection is Look Alive Out There.
“The more extreme things get in reality, the more extreme escapism has to be. It’s like Game of Thrones or bust. But in reality, I think that part of what I’m trying to do with this book — or in anything I write — is to give permission to be mad about little things. Just because there’s all of this, someone still slid their hand down a subway pole and touched you. Or somebody bumped into you. There are still these minor indignities and infractions that occur consistently. And I think there’s some sort of robbing if you tell yourself, Well, I’m not going to be mad about this because of the political landscape that we’re in.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, The Great Courses Plus, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
Interview With a Woman Who Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks
“This baby was unviable, basically. That’s what they say. They say that the baby is ‘incompatible with life.’”
Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.
Joe Exotic
A dark journey Into the world of a man gone wild.
Adventures in the Ransom Trade
On the revolutionaries, highly-paid negotiators, former spies, foreign businessmen and their families, who all played roles in the massive Colombian kidnap and ransom industry during its 1990s heyday.
Living Amid Fear and Oppression in Xinjiang
My wife is not a terrorist.
The Complicated Business of Selling the NYPD Logo
The city of New York is suing a Long Island woman for making NYPD T-shirts. But is it really about money or controlling the brand?
Los Angeles Fire Season Is Beginning Again. And It Will Never End.
A bulletin from our climate future.
Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means
The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.
The Unmothered
On losing your mom.
Blow Up: How Half a Tonne of Cocaine Transformed the Life of an Island
What happens when a great deal of cocaine suddenly washes up on the shores of a very small island.
Is Poverty Necessary?
Ideas on labor and capital have remained fixed while the means of production grow ever more alienating.
The Disaster and How Some Escaped
On the curious life of Archibald Butt, confidant to President Taft and tragic victim of the sinking Titanic.
As much as the narrative of Butt’s heroism meant to the family, to the White House, to the military, it seems all too cinematic. The reality is that the experience was probably a great annoyance to him, right up until the moment it became a nightmare.
The Birth-Tissue Profiteers
How well-meaning donations end up fueling an unproven, virtually unregulated $2 billion stem cell industry.
It’s Time to Break Up Facebook
A co-founder makes the case for government intervention.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Lawrence of Arabia"
An unexpected visitor—a camel—helps a woman cope with personal and political turmoil.
Teenage Pricks
How Trumpism operates on the knowledge that some people can get away with anything, and how it offers a false promise to extend that privilege to white kids everywhere
Oh, No, Not Knotweed!
How the most expensive and unstoppable invasive plant crisis inspires madness and panic.
Christine Kenneally has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Monthly. Her 2018 Buzzfeed article, “The Ghosts of the Orphanage,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
"I understood that the abuse was a big part of the story. But the thing that really hooked me and disturbed me and I wouldn’t forget was the depersonalization that went on in these places. It wasn’t just that the records had been lost along the way. It became really clear that the information was intentionally withheld, and it was all part of just this extraordinary depersonalization that happened to these kids.”
Thanks to MailChimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
A confrontation with masculinity gone awry.
Drugs, Guns and Politics Collided in the Small Town of Port Richey. Two Mayors Went to Jail.
A very Florida investigation.
Typewriter Man
The need for a new letter on an old manual machine leads the author to the shop of Martin Tytell — repairman, historian, and high priest of typewriters.
Synthetic Biology Could Bring a Pox on Us All
On July 11, 2002, the researchers revealed that they had synthesized the polio virus, which had been wiped out in the US in 1979. It was the first time a virus had been created from scratch with synthetic DNA. The work was funded by the Pentagon in part to establish whether terrorists could pull off such a feat. The answer was yes.
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
