MOONSTRUCK/Newsweek

As many as 6 per cent of Americans still believe the Apollo moon landing of 1969 was faked. Kurt Soller takes a look at both the camps—the deniers and the believers. Fox Television’s 2001 programme, ‘Conspiracy theory: Did we land on the moon?’ gave a publicity boost to the ‘moon hoax’, forcing NASA to vouch for the veracity of the landing. Meanwhile, the astronauts—Buzz Aldrin and Ed Mitchell—too have taken on the skeptics. Bart Sibrel, the filmmaker behind the moon hoax movie, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, once taunted Aldrin, calling him a “coward”, “liar”, and “thief”. Aldrin’s response: a punch in the face. Ed Mitchell, an astronaut on Apollo 14, reportedly kicked a denier in the rear once.

VANISHING VENICE/National Geographic

Cathy Newman looks at the danger of tourists nudging out the Venetians in Venice. Number of Venetian residents in 2007: 60,000. Number of visitors in 2007: 21 million. Newman says that if you are not in Venice as a tourist, “if you are a resident who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment (elevators are rare in Venice), someone who gets up, goes to work, goes home, Venice is a different place altogether. The abnormal is normal.”

THE (TRUE?) STORY BEHIND FACEBOOK’S FOUNDING/Time

Facebook has long been viewed as the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of the social-networking juggernaut that has garnered more than 200 million users in five years. Kristi Oloffson interviews Ben Mezrich, author of Accidental Billionaires—The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, labelled non-fiction, who wants to make sure readers learn a few more of the names behind Facebook’s runaway success—including that of Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s former best friend and an original Facebook co-founder, and twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the classmates who originally hired Zuckerberg to code a website of their own.

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