[NOTE: Rather than posting haphazardly to this blog, my current plan is to publish haphazardly to my Substack. You should definitely subscribe.]

For most of this year, while finishing The Outside Cats, I basically stopped doing freelance writing. I started up again last month, with a short piece on NASA’s nuclear and Mars ambitions, for Scientific American. (The answer to the headline is “no,” though I had a hard time finding anyone who would say that on the record.)

Then, for The New Yorker, I’ve written two pieces on the return of humans to the moon. The first was something of an elegy for the space program. The NASA that went back to the moon looks a lot like the NASA that went there fifty years ago. But going forward, space exploration will look very different—and that’s not a good thing. A snippet:

Beginning with Artemis III, in the name of efficiency, NASA will start handing major elements of the lunar program over to private companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin. NASA will neither build nor own the next generation of lunar landers. It will basically hire a rideshare service to bring its astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface, and it will even rent its spacesuits from a contractor called Axiom Space. In the Trump Administration’s budget for the fiscal year 2026, it sought to cancel the Artemis rocket, known as the Space Launch System, in favor of commercial alternatives still in development, such as SpaceX’s Starship. The NASA of old was spread across the country so that many communities would benefit from its investments; the new space program will be increasingly privatized and concentrated in Texas and Florida. One wonders if it can live up to NASA’s longstanding motto: “For the benefit of all.”

Read the rest here.

Then, for “The New Yorker Interview,” I visited Johnson Space Center in Houston and met with astronaut Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II. For a guy who just got back from the moon, he was surprisingly modest, and wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable. A snippet from our conversation:

How has your experience changed your perceptions of the Apollo astronauts and what they did?

I really felt disbelief that Apollo 8 had the courage to leave low-Earth orbit for the first time. They went all the way to the moon in that Apollo spacecraft. I just thought about them. I’m, like, I wonder if they were a little bit scared, because I’m a little bit scared. I bet they were a little bit scared. They’d never admit it. I won’t admit it—although I just did—but I bet they were a little bit scared. That was a crazy thing that they did.

For a lot of reasons, those interviews are a lot more difficult to write than essays, and I am very proud of how it turned out. You can read the rest here.