Joyce Carol Oates has written more than 70 books, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Her latest book, The Doll Master and Other Tales of Terror, includes the short story "Soldier," about a man who becomes a local celebrity after gunning down a black teenager, supposedly in self-defense. The story was inspired by real-life cases, as well as by the kind of news stories Oates sees in her Twitter feed.

"On Twitter I follow Anon Cop Watch," Oates says in Episode 202 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "Every day you will get some postings of what the police are doing all over the country, and also in Canada. And basically they're victimizing powerless people."

Oates is extremely active on Twitter, and has attracted almost 150,000 followers, a surprisingly high number for a serious literary writer in her seventies. She says that one of the great strengths of Twitter is that it can draw attention to individual victims in ways that wouldn't be possible with traditional media.

"The New York Times, for instance, would not be able to write about all these cases," she says. "The whole newspaper would be filled with it. So I think that online—and particularly Twitter—is good at revealing these things to people who didn't know anything about it."

But Oates increasingly sees a downside to social media. She thinks the Internet is partly to blame for the extreme polarization of American politics and the growing rift between supporters of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

ADVERTISING

"It's like they're living in the same country but they're in different dimensions," she says. "They immerse themselves in media cocoons. They only go to certain websites, they have their Twitter feed or whatever. They only read certain things."

That's a theme she explores in her upcoming novel A Book of American Martyrs, which presents characters on both sides of the abortion debate. "My novel is sort of about America as this nightmare place where people are living close together but they're in different zones of consciousness, which I see as something tragic," she says.