You Are the Product
A critique of Facebook.
American Hippopotamus
A hundred years ago, in the midst of an American food crisis, two spies who had once sworn to kill each other came together with a plan to feed America: hippo meat.
Who’s Afraid of Claire Messud?
A profile of the writer.
Angels & Demons
On June 4, 1989, the bodies of Jo, Michelle, and Christe were found floating in Tampa Bay. This is the story of the murders, their aftermath, and the handful of people who kept faith amid the unthinkable.
Unlearning the Myth of American Innocence
On coming to see your home country the way the rest of the world does.
The Rise of the Valkyries
The women of the alt-right.
The Endless Death of Kyle Dinkheller
Two decades later, a traffic stop on a country road is still teaching police officers about deadly force – and the cost of hesitation. Part 1 of “The Trigger and the Choice,” a 3-part series.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Control Negro"
A professor conducts a lifelong racial experiment.
The Story of the DuckTales Theme
A woo-hoo heard around the world.
Underworld
Five hundred feet below ground with Ohio coal miners.
I followed them underground, home, to church, to the strip club where they drink and gossip and taunt and jab and worry about one another. I listened while they worried about Smitty, the loner of the group, who had just ordered himself a mail-order woman.
How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed Into Policing
“These documents show how Palantir applies Silicon Valley’s playbook to domestic law enforcement. New users are welcomed with discounted hardware and federal grants, sharing their own data in return for access to others’. When enough jurisdictions join Palantir’s interconnected web of police departments, government agencies, and databases, the resulting data trove resembles a pay-to-access social network—a Facebook of crime that’s both invisible and largely unaccountable to the citizens whose behavior it tracks.”
David Gessner is the author of ten books. His latest is Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth.
“The ambition got in my way at first. Because I wanted my stuff to be great, and it froze me up. But later on it was really helpful. I’m startled by the way people don’t, you know, admit [they care] … it seems unlikely people wouldn’t want to be immortal.”
Thanks to Casper, Squarespace, and MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
Ultimate Glory
A youth wasted on pro-level ultimate frisbee.
Hiroshima
The lives of six people who survived the atomic bomb.
Not Without My Brothers
When Michael Deng joined an Asian-American frat, he was searching for belonging and identity. Two months later he was dead.
Total Eclipse
“Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”
Six-Man Forever
How one girl saved a football season in a small, rural town in Texas.
The Complete History of the IBM PC
A two-part story on Bill Gates and his revolutionary machine.
The Toxic Drama of YA Twitter
Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social-media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons — sometimes before anybody’s even read them.
Ain't It Always Stephen Stills
An ode to the guitarist.
Jeni Stepanek’s Last Heartsong
A mom looks back on the “brief but wondrous experience” of raising her son Mattie, a little boy poet with a devastating rare disease who earned a following around the world.
The Hungriest Man on Earth
How the heaviest man in the NFL survived a life of pain and transformed his body after falling in love.
Giving "The Devil" His Due
Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, the founder of a barbaric Haitian paramilitary group, vanished from Port-au-Prince and resurfaced as a real estate agent in Queens.
The Lost Girl of Unadilla
ShyShy Pate has been missing for 19 years, but you’ve probably never heard of her.
The Seeker
The complicated life and death of Hideki Irabu, a pitcher who was supposed to become a Yankee legend and found heartache instead.
