Chasing Alexander Supertramp
Twenty years after the world first heard about Christopher McCandless, fans of Into the Wild continue to risk their lives to reach the bus where he died.
The End of Straight
On a transition and its aftermath.
Madam Ram
The life and death of Georgia Frontiere, who was the only woman owner in professional sports when her St. Louis Rams won the 2000 Super Bowl.
There Is No Shame Worse Than Poor Teeth in a Rich World
Life in America without dental care.
Crowdsourcing Justice
It took only a handful of people to wrongly convict Ed Ates of murder. It took an army to free him from prison. Now comes the hard part.
The Life and Death of an Instafish
What one funny-looking fish taught us about evolution, the internet, and the monsters we create.
On the Mueller Report, Vol. 1
An interesting side effect of reading the report is to feel that anyone who claims to have understood its arguments, purposes, and consequences within twenty-four or forty-eight hours of encountering it is likely untrustworthy.
Maybe It’s Lyme
What happens when illness becomes an identity?
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’
Paul Gonzales scammed his online dates into buying him expensive dinners. Then they 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’s 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.
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.
