The tendrils of Christina Koch’s flyaway hair swirled about in the gravityless cockpit of the Orion spacecraft, seeming to represent all of the untetheredness of the Artemis II mission. As her mane eddied, like its own separate creature, throughout the record 252,756-mile journey to the radio-silent black side of the moon, it brought a sense of irrepressible aliveness to that dead stone up there.
Until this past week, a certain ho-humness had set in about human space flight.

The following contains spoilers for the film The Drama.
The Drama features the kind of unforgettable first-kiss story that would belong in the First Kiss Hall of Fame, if such a thing existed. Late one night, Charlie (played by Robert Pattinson) tries to sneak Emma (Zendaya) into the museum at which he works, but his ID clears only the first of multiple doors. The alarms go off, the two get locked in the entry hall, and as Emma panics, Charlie rushes over to kiss her, quieting her fear.

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Legal opinions tend to be dry, wordy, and intentionally vague. One issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel earlier this month is none of these.
“You have asked whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (‘PRA’ or ‘Act’) is constitutional.

Seeing the Earth from space will change you so profoundly that there’s a term for it: the overview effect. The extreme minority who have had the privilege describe it similarly. You see something that you were never meant to see, namely the Earth just sitting there, with the entire universe surrounding it.

U.S. presidential campaigns usually get started at the Iowa State Fair or some other exalted arena of Americana. J. D. Vance chose Budapest. The vice president visited Hungary’s capital today to align himself in the most visible way possible with the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is fighting to hold on to power in parliamentary elections scheduled for Sunday.
The U.S. government’s support for Orbán had already been clear.

I’ve never been to space, but as a young child my ego was obliterated by the short film Powers of Ten. I was at summer camp, on a sticky-hot day that was suddenly interrupted by a thunderstorm. We were all herded into a room, the film projector was rolled out, and red-white-and-blue popsicles distributed. This was normally an occasion for Mighty Mouse or Tom and Jerry cartoons—a much more pleasurable situation for me than trying to catch a ball.

The most moving image to emerge from the Artemis II mission has not been a snapshot of the moon or the Earth. The camera was instead pointed at the astronauts themselves, squeezed inside their tiny capsule. Christina Koch sat in the foreground, strapped into her chair. Only parts of the other three were visible. Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian, was talking to ground control but also to an international livestream audience.

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The president of the United States is losing his head, and that means the rest of us must keep ours. At 8:06 a.m. eastern daylight time, Donald Trump posted this on his Truth Social site:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.