How the Alt Weekly Lost Its ‘Alt’

In May, when a Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 felonies related to his falsification of business records, it should have been front-page news for The Village Voice. After all, the Voice, the pioneering alternative weekly newspaper turning 70 next year, was the first publication to scrutinize the dodgy transactions of its hometown anti-hero, as Tricia Romano recounts in The Freaks Came Out to Write, her exhaustive oral history of what Playboy once dubbed “the unofficial organ of Greenwich Village.”