In the 1930s, three decades before Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon, Buck Rogers had his own Western-like space adventures—in comic books and on the silver screen. When NASA got off the ground in the 1960s, the first generation of astronauts looked just like him: all white men, just without ray guns.
A half-century later, sci-fi has shot past real-world space programs. There are still Buck Rogerses in the 21st century, but there are also Star Trek: Discovery’s Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Andor’s Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), characters that show the breadth of diversity in the world in the way early sci-fi, and early NASA, never really did. Shows like those, as well as series like The Expanse and Foundation, have remained strides ahead of the US space agency, which is just now preparing to send the first woman and the first person of color to walk on the moon in 2026.
There’s been good news recently for bibliophiles in Boston; a wave of independent bookstores are opening new storefronts around the city.
Shop owners, managers, and industry leaders are cheering the development, which comes on the heels of a pandemic that caused the shuttering of many local businesses.
Of all the people in Jonathan Saha's life worth dedicating his book to, none of them could match the impact, or lack thereof, of Toast the cat.
Saha's cat "was no help at all," reads the dedication page in Colonizing Animals which recently went viral on Twitter, collecting more than 266,000 likes.
Skeptical lottery officials ushered him into a back office and checked his tickets carefully. Each was genuine and contained the four winning numbers—7-8-0-0—drawn on June 18. The odds of winning were just 1 in 416—not terribly long by lottery standards—but it was extremely unusual for someone to play the same numbers 500 times in one day. There were other red flags. Most people who present themselves at lottery claim centers are ecstatic, yet this winner waited for his prizes with the impatience of someone picking up dry cleaning. It took staff six hours to cut 500 checks for $5,000 each. Then Gjonaj (his name is pronounced Joe-nye) tucked them inside the pocket of his sports jacket and roared away in his Lincoln Navigator, richer by $2.5 million.
Over the next nine months, the 40-year-old real-estate broker would return many times, exchanging thousands of winning tickets for nearly $30 million, making him one of the biggest winners in the history of the Michigan Lottery. His luck appeared to defy the laws of statistics and probability, and sent the lottery commission into a spin. Had Gjonaj found a way to rig the machines? Or had he somehow developed a system to predict the winning combinations again and again and again?
Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, sixteen days before Voyager 1. The little brother went first. But Voyager 1 went faster. It overtook Voyager 2 a few months later. In the 1980s it overtook Pioneer 11. On February 17, 1998, it overtook Pioneer 10. From that day forward, it’s been the most distant human-made object from Earth, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. The two Voyagers were only able to reach escape velocity with the help of multiple gravity assists made possible by an alignment of planets that only happens every 176 years. Even the New Horizons probe, launched almost four decades later in 2006, will never overtake them. They will always be the farthest away.
Physicists don’t think the truth should be “out there.” They want nature to come naturally, make sense, fit in or have a good reason not to.
Unnaturalness is a problem.
The poster child for unnatural is gravity. It has never played well with others; it’s absurdly weak compared with the other movers and shakers of the cosmos—electromagnetism and nuclear forces. A tiny magnet can lift a large metal spoon off the ground against the pull of gravity of the entire Earth. No one knows why. (Gravity even speaks a different language—generally smooth geometry—as opposed to the buzzing quantum probability-speak native to other forces.)
The remarkable thing about this violence-soaked novel narrated by a dead man is how full of life it is. Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes a decade after his rollicking debut Chinaman, which combined the love of cricket with the horror of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Set at the tail end of the 80s, his second novel again plumbs national violence and atrocity, teasing out its roots in colonial history. It’s also an offbeat love story, both romantic and platonic, and a whodunnit written in the urgent, intimate second person.
It’s one of the first things we learn about Auschwitz, and one of the hardest to forget: that the Nazis tricked their victims before gassing them. When transports of Jews arrived for extermination — some 1 million people between 1942 and 1944 — the SS reassured their victims with promises of food and a warm shower while marching them off to the gas chamber. The perverse theater of death included a military van marked with a red cross, in which an SS “medic” ferried canisters of Zyklon B.
The Nazis weren’t playing a cruel joke or even covering their tracks. There was a logic behind this program of deception. Walter Rosenberg, an 18-year-old Slovak Jew enlisted in the commando charged with unloading the trains, figured it out. The prisoners’ obedience kept the machinery of death running smoothly, which the SS required: because the transports arrived in such quick succession, but also because the victims far outnumbered the guards. “If the Jews knew what was coming,” Jonathan Freedland writes in “The Escape Artist,” his riveting chronicle of Rosenberg’s escape from Auschwitz and subsequent effort to rally the world to action, “what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?” Even a small amount of resistance could be enough.