When the global investment bank Bear Stearns went broke in March of 2008, I was a college senior on spring break in Florida. My two friends and I had one simple rule—free housing, no matter what—which is how Kelly and I wound up eating a burnt scramble one morning while our ...
They called it a “Sputnik moment.” In October, the Financial Times reported that over the summer of 2021, the Chinese government tested a new missile. It was reported to have been fired from a so-called hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the planet at speeds exceeding ...
The first Black woman in space, Dr. Mae Jemison, told poet Nikki Giovanni in a 1993 Essence magazine interview, “The Third World will be the ultimate beneficiary of space technology because we’re moving away from infrastructures.” Giovanni, who like Jemison has Alabama ...
In the spring of 2016, with most of the United States suffering through a protracted nervous breakdown brought on by that year’s presidential primaries, the billionaire venture capitalist Yuri Milner called a press conference near the top of One World Trade Center in hopes of ...
This past October, while scrolling through social media one Wednesday morning, I reluctantly clicked into a livestream of yet another billionaire joyride to the lower limits of outer space.
It had been a summer of first launches, overhyped PR events intended to jump-start a ...
We’re unsure, at first, whether to take her as a fraud, a mesmeric storyteller, or a woman improvising to survive. The nun writes that her faithless parents, loath to forfeit a costly dowry for an unloved love child, coerced her into God’s service. It’s eighteenth-century ...