Chris Hadfield is one of the most famous astronauts in the world. But when he decided to pursue space travel, his home country, Canada, didn’t even have a space program. How did he go about taking practical steps to chase a seemingly impossible dream? It all started when nine-year-old Hadfield, glued to his family’s TV set, […]
The Roots of Unrest
Over the last few weeks, concern regarding inequities in the US criminal justice system have come to a head in protests against police brutality across the country. While civil unrest has spread rapidly, the underlying issues represent a chronic problem of which many people were blissfully unaware: Racism is a longstanding problem in the US […]
3 Tips for Weathering a Downturn
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment. According to the World Bank, the global pandemic has triggered a recession that will be the deepest one the world has seen in decades. Many people, particularly those who have lost their jobs or fear they soon will, feel […]
Deadly secrets
Nuclear accidents and secrecy are a terrifying combination. But even a government apparatus as clandestine as the Soviet Union couldn’t hide a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl. While Ukrainians’ mistaken notion that radiation poisoning could be neutralized with vodka was dispelled quickly in the aftermath of the crisis, denial of responsibility and propaganda persisted […]
A Field Guide to Extinction
They ruled the planet for 150 million years. And then they were just…gone. Millions of years later, the traces of these giant reptiles—their strange skeletons, with teeth the size of railroad spikes—still inspire a powerful sense of awe. Our Instaread on Steve Brussate’s THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DINOSAURS captures the current state of […]
A Tour of Silicon Valley
For some, Silicon Valley is a place to live and work. For others, the Valley seems so alien that it might as well be another planet. This rift has perhaps never been so clear as it is in a trio of pieces in the New York Times that ran this week about how parents in […]
Walter Isaacson’s Renaissance Men
Walter Isaacson was once labeled a “protean biographer” by the New York Times. The phrase was a clever reference to the way his writing style shifts to accommodate the demands of a given subject. As a professor of history, a journalist, a network news leader, and the head of a respected think tank, Isaacson is […]
Star Wars
Space has always occupied a special place in the human imagination. From the landscape of literature and movies to the realities of hard science, it carries heavy symbolic weight. Progress, mystery, loneliness, death — space has come to represent some of our most cherished ambitions and private fears. But maybe most of all its exploration […]
