Silicon Valley's birthrate has fallen to 9.7 per thousand people while its billionaires chase treatments to live forever. Jacob Dreyer traces how Bryan Johnson's Don't Die summit and a rush of untested Chinese peptides have turned longevity into an obsession just as reproduction collapses across the world's biggest tech hubs. South Korea's birthrate has dropped to roughly five per thousand. China's has hit a record low. Elon Musk has more than a dozen children. Most of the engineers building his AI have none. What happens when the future arrives and almost nobody is there to inherit it?
Five men in their twenties sprint through New Jersey bogs at 2 a.m., trying to win the 24 hour World Series of Birding. Rachel Gutman-Wei follows Team Mega chasing a rare sedge wren along abandoned train tracks, then traces how birding stopped being a retiree's hobby. The Super Bowl champion Sam Darnold and the pop star Ariana Grande now use the bird identification app Merlin. The National Audubon Society's college chapters have grown from ten in 2019 to 117 today. Even Gutman-Wei isn't sure why chasing a bird she may never see keeps working on her.
Women in sequined tails glide behind a glass wall in a theater cut straight into Florida limestone, breathing through hoses hidden in the rocks. Jack Burke sits in the audience of a show that has run since 1947, when Newton Perry stared into a spring and asked what if there were mermaids. Elvis came. Ed Sullivan booked them. Disney World opened in 1971 and nearly killed the place, until Florida named it a state park in 2008. Burke finds today's mermaids working the job as a side hustle, still smiling underwater for whoever shows up. The illusion holds anyway.
A screaming match breaks out every morning over a pair of socks, so a child therapist tells Meghan Flaherty to stop calming her son down and let him fight instead. She takes him to a bookstore's Dungeons and Dragons night, then builds her own barbarian named Bitch Briar to understand him from the inside. Gentle parenting never worked on a kid who only mirrored back rage. The therapist Katie Lear runs a group for kids like him that she calls Murderhobo Island. Flaherty is still rolling the dice on whether raising a little monster this way will actually work.
