Weekend Edition Saturday

Most people familiar with "face-swapping" know it as an innocuous social media feature. An algorithm captures a person's face and pastes it onto someone else's. The result is rarely seamless and often funny.

Humans have wanted to go to Mars for a long time. NASA says it wants to send people there by the 2030s, while private companies like SpaceX have proposed building colonies on the Red Planet.

There are, of course, a lot of kinks that have to be worked out for us to get there. One of them is living in an enclosed space with a few other people for months on end.

For the past four years, Matt Black has tried to document poverty in the U.S. He's traveled to places where it's both very common and often overlooked, trying to make poverty more visible to America.

Black, who is an associate member of Magnum Photos, has been working on a project called The Geography of Poverty. He's traveled about 100,000 miles across 46 states, and some of his photos appear in the current issue of Time magazine.

A year ago this weekend, Albert Kiecke and Becky Dinsmore came to Washington, D.C., but the friends of 50 years visited the nation's capital for two very different events. Kiecke came to celebrate President Trump's inauguration, while Dinsmore said it was her civic duty to protest at the Women's March.

At the time, the lifelong friends from Houston said they didn't want the country's political divisions to affect their friendship.

Hanif Kureishi has written plays and movies — notably the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, which was nominated for an Oscar. But he's also won awards for his short stories and novels.

The British author's new book is a slender volume called The Nothing. Considering that there is very little sex in the book, it is a dirty book, about a nasty, dirty old man. The protagonist Waldo is in his 80s — he's "very withered" and "barely mobile," Kureishi says — when he suspects his younger wife Zee may be having an affair with one of his best friends.

What was once a crowded row of houses along Hopper Avenue in Santa Rosa, Calif., is now a vast dirt plain. But in empty lot after empty lot, people have put up Christmas trees. Red ribbons and shimmering silver tinsel defy the landscape.

Louis Pell and his 8-year-old daughter Lilly staked a 10-foot noble fir in the spot where their front door used to be. In October, wildfires in Northern California destroyed thousands of homes in Santa Rosa, including those in the Coffey Park neighborhood.