Search Results for: Space

Travel, Foreignness, and the Spaces in Between: A Pico Iyer Reading List

Longreads Pick

These seven reads reveal Iyer as a perpetual wanderer of both place and time: navigating spaces in flux or forgotten, meditating on finding one’s place in an ever-shifting world, and, as part of this journey, exploring that which is deep within us.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 12, 2015

Travel, Foreignness, and the Spaces in Between: A Pico Iyer Reading List

Pico Iyer’s travel writing — whether he’s describing a long walk in Kyoto, a jetlag-fueled airport layover, or a quiet moment in a monastery — captures not just the physicality of places, but also the spaces within and between them.

In his essay “Why We Travel,” Iyer writes that he has been a traveler since birth: born in Oxford to parents from India, schooled in England and the United States, then living in Japan since 1992 (with annual trips to California). These seven reads reveal Iyer as a perpetual wanderer of both place and time: navigating spaces in flux or forgotten, meditating on finding one’s place in an ever-shifting world, and, as part of this journey, exploring that which is deep within us. Read more…

Elon Musk’s Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla

Longreads Pick

“In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile.” An excerpt from Ashlee Vance’s new book, on how Musk almost went bankrupt trying to keep both SpaceX and Tesla afloat, all while his personal life was unraveling.

Published: May 15, 2015
Length: 35 minutes (8,873 words)

Death in Space

Longreads Pick

What should be done if an astronaut dies in space? A look at the unique methodological and ethical questions that long-haul space travel raises.

Source: Slate
Published: Apr 7, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,160 words)

An Intruder in Two Spaces: What It Feels Like to Be Biracial

This confusion at your own place is the essence of being biracial. Even though you owe no one an explanation, there’s a desire to explain, which comes from believing that just by being yourself you are a liar. You’re an intruder in either space, with no right to claim one or the other without a heavy caveat. You’re not really what you say you are, not “technically.” It’s my feeling the need to need to clarify at those weddings, to say “I’m not entirely part of this group” or “It’s ok that I’m wearing this because my dad is Indian,” before anyone could call me out on my trespass.

When you’re constantly being asked “what” and not “who” you are, this is a knee-jerk reaction. You’re ready for it before that puzzled look appears on a stranger’s face. Being biracial means having to justify why your skin is this color when your mom is that color, or why you know so much about Indian music because you don’t look like you should know about Indian music, or why you don’t know more because you look like you should be an expert.

And you’re told not to be mad, because these people are “just curious.” It’s still a rare thing! You’re making a big deal out of it, it’s just a joke. You should help them learn. Forgive them if they’re mad at you for wearing a bindi, they just thought you were appropriating. Understand when they see your name after your relatives’ “normal” names, they just want to know how you got there. They just want to explain to you that maybe you’re using the wrong words to describe yourself. It’s too much hassle to get mad, listen and answer their questions and save yourself the frustration.

— Jaya Saxena, in The Aerogram, writing about her experience with being biracial.

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Photo: anurag agnihotri

‘The Library Is One of the Few Civic Spaces We Have Left’

I have a dear friend who’s working at the library in Chattanooga, which is one of the rare states where the budget is increasing, and she’s doing all of this neat stuff with technology: bringing in 3-D printers, teaching web-use skills, all of these public services that are really necessary beyond making books available for people. I’m bullish on the need for libraries. I’m pessimistic about our ability as a society to come together and pay for their small sanctuary if our public services are under attack.

The library’s one of the few civic spaces we have left. People are feeling like there’s no other ways for these online platforms and services to be run, it’s our destiny to have them be privately run, and yet we invoke the analogy of the library or archive all the time. To me it says that we find it realistic that Google will be our archive when it’s an advertising company. We’ve seen them get rid of services that are not profitable (Google Reader), and we’ve seen them demote things like Google Scholar. That’s realism, where it’s unrealistic to think we’d build on the success of the library with a national repository for knowledge, arts, and culture?

Libraries exist and they’re open. Libraries exist with all these values we invoke in the digital sphere, but there are very few people thinking about how we might build upon them.

Writer and documentarian Astra Taylor, in Flavorwire, on the importance of collectively supporting and funding culture.

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Photo: raypride, Flickr

From Boston to Outer Space: Our College Pick

Longreads Pick

Aileen Gallagher’s latest story selection, from The Quad at Boston University.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 21, 2014

From Boston To Outer Space: Our College Pick

Good journalism explains complicated subjects in ways that the audience can understand. Great journalism makes those subjects exciting. In his story about an organization at Boston University that’s trying to build a rocket, Jake Lucas conveys both why the students love what they do and what exactly is so difficult about it. When Lucas writes about the final test of the Mk IV Quasar, the audience shares a victory with the exceptional students who built it.

The Road to Space

Jake Lucas | The Quad | May 9, 2014 |10 minutes (2,488 words)

Welcome to the Real Space Age

Longreads Pick

Despite fears that NASA and the United States have given up on space exploration, the focus has simply shifted to private companies like Virgin and SpaceX, which are preparing for commercial space travel:

“This was the International Symposium for Personal and Commerical Spaceflight. It had been co-founded eight years earlier by a New Mexico State professor named Pat Hynes, who had been studying and advocating for the commercial potential of space for twenty years. She has watched the conference grow in size and influence alongside the industry. Now, the facility buzzed with engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs and astronauts. Sponsors included Lockheed Martin and Boeing, a European company touting its ability to ‘launch any payload to any orbit at anytime,’ and another company claiming the authority to sell plots of land on the moon. Hynes, ecstatic, inaugurated the conference by shouting a ‘Let’s rock this house!’ welcome, before introducing Michael Lopez-Alegria, a recently retired space-shuttle astronaut who spoke of his conversion from ‘skeptic with outright disdain for the idea of commercial space” to a “Kool-Aid-pouring believer’ in the private space industry.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: May 20, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,219 words)