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Saturn may be photogenic, but Mars is our nearest neighbor. As the planet approached its closest point to Earth, Hubble had a look. Yes, those summertime dust storms are raging on, and the swirling red particle clouds are in sharp contrast to the bright white polar caps. But also making cameos in the image are the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. They’re tiny: Phobos is 14 miles across, and Deimos just 8 miles wide. Reaching for the stars is a lot more fun when the stars are closer. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's 1981, in a version of reality where the Cold War was waged not human to human, but human to extraterrestrial enemy from beyond the stars. To fight, we developed robot bodies to wear in space; these Ship-Selves are advanced and almost unkillable, weapons and homes and clothes and identities all rolled into one. And, of course, we got teenagers to pilot them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A few years ago, I took a weekend wilderness survival class. Deep in the remote woods of Oregon’s coast range, we strung plastic sheets up with fishing line for shelter and practiced signaling with tiny pocket mirrors. Enthralled, I watched as the instructor slowly teased a cotton ball daubed with petroleum jelly into a roaring campfire. Survival class aside, fire starting isn’t one of my skills. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Once upon a time, there was a fringe news outlet with a loud and dissenting opinion. A fatal shooting, it claimed, was not at all what it seemed to be: It was a hoax, orchestrated by some shadowy force—probably Communists—bent on replacing freedom with dictatorship. This was untrue, but that didn’t stop the outlet from naming and insulting alleged collaborators. And so the media outlet was sued for defamation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In singularly unsurprising news, Brookstone has filed for bankruptcy. The company will shutter its remaining 101 mall storefronts, officially closing out an era that began its fade years ago. Even if you won’t mourn its disappearance—even if you haven’t stepped inside a mall since the Mallrats era—it’s worth a moment of appreciation, and a full accounting of what’s been lost. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a book that drove me away from books. This wasn’t a trauma of distaste, or indulgence: not a literary bad mussel, not waking up on the floor of someone's house with a swimming head and the knowledge that I could never again be within smelling distance of their first editions. My aversion was borne of fear. The fear took root in 2016—which, while decidedly not-great in general, was very much a great year for books. Especially fiction. Especially especially speculative fiction. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in the last presidential campaign season, reporters on the tech and politics beats began noticing a rise in far-right memes that supported Trump. Memes being memes, these seemed initially like weird, off-color jokes. They wondered: What the hell is going on? Was this shitposting ironic or serious? Or both? Either way, it seemed newsworthy. The memes were climbing the trending lists on every social network and landing on the front page of Reddit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Quick, think of a California hotbed of technological might. There’s Silicon Valley, duh. And enterprising Silicon Beach, down in the state’s sunny, laidback southland. But cast thine eyes north, young techies, past the agricultural innovation stronghold at UC Davis and the domed, white capitol building where the bureaucrats and public officials controlling the nation’s largest state economy play. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The fact that you're even reading these words represents a victory. Wordpress-powered websites publish more than 77 million posts each week. The New York Times runs about 150 stories every day. (Here at WIRED, it's more like 15 or 20.) Last year, 687.2 million books were sold in the United States—and that's just print versions, not e-books. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Consuming pop culture is my job. Well, writing about it is my job, but that makes keeping tabs on movies, television, podcasts, Twitter/Instagram feeds, and everything else a professional necessity. Yet, there's one high-protein item that always seems to be missing in my media diet: books. It's not that I don't read them—I've got two to three going at any given time—it's that I feel like I don't read them enough. How do I know this? Fucking Goodreads. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices