Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?
A profile.
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Art of Fiction No. 221
“The ‘hard’–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.”
What Happens If We Hit Sperm Count Zero?
Men have become increasingly infertile, so much so that within a generation they may lose the ability to reproduce entirely.
The Meaning of Serena Williams
Black excellence in the land of tennis.
Naomi Osaka’s Breakthrough Game
The 20-year-old is poised to burst into the top tier of women’s tennis. Can she also burst Japan’s expectations of what it means to be Japanese?
Farm to Fable
Restaurants that promise locally sourced ingredients are almost always lying.
The Perfectionist
A profile of rapper Mac Miller published on September 6, the day before he died.
Invasive Reptiles Are Taking Over Florida—and Devouring Its Birds Along the Way
Birds like Roseate Spoonbills and Burrowing Owls are ending up in the stomachs of hungry pythons and nile monitors. Is it too late to stop them?
A Turbulent Mind
Andrew Goldstein’s crime set in motion a dramatic shift in how we care for the violent mentally ill. Including for himself—when he’s released this month.
Blood and Oil
Mexico’s drug cartels are moving into the gasoline industry—infiltrating the national oil company, selling stolen fuel on the black market and engaging in open war with the military.
How BoJack Horseman Got Made
An oral history.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Wait Time"
A woman copes with her husband's terminal illness.
Meet the Table Busser Who’s Worked at the Same Wilmette Pancake House for 54 Years
Othea Loggan came to Chicago and got a job bussing tables and washing dishes at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in Wilmette in 1964. He still works there today.
The Mystery of Tucker Carlson
A profile of the Fox News commentator.
The Big Lie
A professor schemed to get a raise and win his department’s respect. Instead, he wrecked his career.
Elif Batuman is a novelist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest article is “Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry.”
“I hear novelists say things sometimes like the character does something they don’t expect. It’s like talking to people who have done ayahuasca or belong to some cult. That’s how I felt about it until extremely recently. All of these people have drunk some kind of Kool Aid where they’re like, ‘I’m in this trippy zone where characters are doing things.’ And I would think to myself, if they were men—Wow, this person has devised this really ingenious way to avoid self-knowledge. If they were women, I would think—Wow, this woman has found an ingenious way to become complicit in her own bullying and silencing. It’s only kind of recently—and with a lot of therapy actually—that I’ve come to see that there is a mode of fiction that I can imagine participating in where, once I’ve freed myself of a certain amount of stuff I feel like I have to write about, which has gotten quite large by this point, it would be fun to make things up and play around.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Google Play, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
The Imam’s Widow
Minara Akhter came to America with uncertainty and hope. Then her husband, a Muslim religious leader, was murdered in a suspected hate crime.
The American Nightmare
More than 50 foreclosure stories have one word in common: Nightmare.
Tiger
On mascots.
Beating the Drum
How Rudy Giuliani turned into Trump’s clown.
Generation Underwater
How Washington left students to drown in debt.
All Rise
How Viagra went from a medical mistake to a $3 billion industry.
The Man Who Walked Backward
When the Great Depression put Plennie Wingo’s bustling Abilene cafe out of business, he tried to find fame, fortune, and a sense of meaning the only way he knew how: by embarking on an audacious trip around the world on foot. In reverse.
The Village Voice, 1955-2018
Our archive of articles from The Village Voice, which shut down Friday.
The Trigger Effect
In September 2017, a police officer shot and killed a queer college student in Atlanta. By the end of the year, several of the student’s friends had been arrested, and two were dead. What happened at Georgia Tech?
