| | | | Dear star-and-newsletter-gazers,
When John F. Kennedy told a crowd in Houston that that we would go to space, he cautioned that this would be our "most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure." Space is ours to roam, he declared, even if we die on the way.
Early on in our cosmic stunts we knew to anticipate the worst. Only two days before Buzz and Neil survived their lunar landing, Nixon's chief-of-staff received a two-page memo dictating what the President would say in the even of a lunar disaster.
"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," Nixon would tell a camera from behind the Resolute Desk. NASA would end communications and a clergyman would "adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to the 'deepest of the deep.'"
Such was the fate of poor puppy Laika, the stray Moscovite who became both the first living creature to enter Earth's orbit and the first perished creature to stay there. Soviet scientists had expected Laika to die of oxygen deprivation seven days into her trip; the fear and the heat killed her within a few hours.
Laika never came home. Haruki Murakami later wrote of her: "The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?"
We'll have to wonder the same of Opportunity. Yesterday, NASA announced that the Rover's mission had concluded following a Martian dust storm. "There had been a lot of talking and laughing and whatnot between crying and hugging," one NASA scientist told the New York Times in their ro-bituary. "As soon as that moment happened, it just went silent."
Now, reader, we have something to confess. We're in a deep spot here, contemplating mortality and infinity, and although you should have every right to expect a tidy, wise closing thought within the next few paragraphs, that's not what we have for you today.
Instead we offer you a photo — a very, very sweet, terrestrial photo — of that one time that Alana's dog, Kane, dressed himself up for Halloween as a Mars... Rover. | | We owe you so much, all you good good rovers.
Onwards and upwards. | | [ In Case You Missed It ] | |  | | When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey unveiled a resolution for a Green New Deal last week, the framework and its implicit policies became front-page news. We wondered how the language around a "Green New Deal" could stand to reshape the national conversation on climate change. Bob spoke with Kate Aronoff, contributing writer at The Intercept, about the historical precedent, and why bold, sweeping strategies are imperative for meeting the scale of this crisis. Listen here. | |  | | For those of our listeners outside of New York who don't already know, our local modern marvel, the subway, is in crisis mode. And for the listeners who do already know and can't stand to hear yet another New Yorker complain about their commute: this podcast is so much more than that! Chris Hayes spoke with transit reporter Aaron W. Gordon (author of one of this newsletter's favorite newsletters) about why the local press took so long to get to the root of the present problem, and why the troubles here should raise red flags for Americans everywhere. Check it out. | |  | | We could happily copy-paste dozens of graphs from web seer Patricia Lockwood's new essay on what she calls the "portal" to demonstrate to you what a nasty bit of clarity it is. In the interest of your time, we'll settle on just this: "She saw him as the blazing endpoint of a civilisation: ships on the Atlantic, the seasickness of ancestors over the churning green, the fact that he looked just like his son, whose pictures he sometimes posted. And if someone doesn't, she thought, how will we preserve it for the future — how it felt, to be a man around the turn of the century posting increasing amounts of his balls online?" Click and read, you monster. | |  | A Friend Needs Our Help Radio producer and former On The Media intern Liyna Anwar was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer called acute myeloid leukemia. She urgently needs a bone marrow transplant. Liyna hasn't found a match within her family or within the 19 million people on the blood stem cell donor registry. Her best chance of finding a donor is within the South Asian community, but right now South Asians only make up two percent of the registry. And even if you're not South Asian, joining the registry makes a big difference. Seventy percent of people do not have a matching family member. To learn more about the registry and receive a cheek swab kit, visit join.bethematch.org/SwabforLiyna or text SwabForLiyna to 61474. Before joining The L.A. Times, she produced stories for StoryCorps. On This Valentine's Day, listen to a love story from Liyna.
| |  | | For this week's pod extra, we feature a conversation from WNYC'S Brian Lehrer Show. Brian talked with Columbia University President Lee Bollinger and University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, editors of The Free Speech Century, a collection of essays by leading scholars, marking 100 years since the Supreme Court issued the three decisions that established the modern notion of free speech. Whether it's fake news or money in politics, we're still arguing over the First Amendment, and their book lays out the origins of the argument just after the first World War. Listen now. | | | What to expect when you're expecting faulty coverage of women presidential candidates. | | | Thanks for listening, and for reading. We love feedback, so please contact us with any questions or comments. We're busy, but we read them all, promise. | | | | | | |
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