Pairs well with news of the 1st private space telescope, a return to the era of Licks and Lowells. Turn out we've lived in a brief window where cosmic exploration was driven by the curiosity of citizens in a democracy, not rich eccentrics, insecure sovereigns, industries, or navies. It was awesome.

Some good news, if you need it: The city council of Franklin NC has voted to return an important Cherokee mound to the EBCI. "Noquisiyi ("star place") is part of a series of earthen mounds.. the heart of the Cherokee civilization" wlos.com/news/local/t...

My friend, a wall surrounds us, and spheres that do not have any gap. Here we are, like the yolk and the white within an egg, and the universe is an egg. You suppose that there is a shelter for you in bad times, but how could you take refuge? There is neither opening nor way out. -ha-Nagid

awesome how we can now talk about space militarization like TV ads talk about the state lottery

Meanwhile in space www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🔭

My latest labor of editing love is this stunner by @christianelliott.me about herbicide drift, a silent ecological crisis ravaging the remaining native hardwood trees of the U.S. Midwest. Sadly I did not get to use my preferred hed, The Fast and the Furious: Midwest Drift

have you ever been somewhere so dark you could step outside & immediately spot the Milky Way? i traveled to the Upper Peninsula to learn about efforts to balance industrialization & economic growth with the preservation of starry skies: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/s...

I wrote this week's Screenland column about the houses collapsing in the Outer Banks, an unusually visible example of a problem--the potentially rapid collapse of assets in a quickly changing world--that's much bigger www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/m...

use chatbots all you like, but I'll be over here channeling the astral magic from a planetary conjunction into a metallic golem that can answer any question

"Nearly midway in scale between the atom and the star there is another structure no less marvelous--the human body. Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. About 10^27 atoms build his body; about 10^28 human bodies constitute enough material to build a star." -Eddington, 1927

"The narrative of technological inevitability relies on a society-wide conflation of efficiency with value, a profound denial of and disinterest in human agency, and [...] the shallowest possible grasp of history." @lizziewade.bsky.social on AI: theantiquarian.email/archive/is-a... 🧪

I'm kind of mad that growing up they would bring up how Abraham Joshua Heschel's activism put him on the Right Side of History but nobody told me he could write the most amazing trippy sentences! "Time is eternity broken in space, like a ray of light refracted in the water." What????

This is so cool. Siblings of the Pleiades strewn over the entire sky. Within some of the oldest written languages in the world, from Sumerian to Eblaite to Akkadadian and Hebrew, the name for Pleiades has etymological links to the word "family," and now that family is much bigger.

This is particularly sad as Lowell has long been a centre for Solar System planetary astronomy, a rare field internationally 🔭

Google says it will start experimenting with data center satellite constellations to solve the problem of more efficiently farming sunlight into "compute" for AI. What I couldn't quite glean from the preprint was the size of the things they were thinking, but they do compare it to Starlink a lot.

Book or paper reference request: I'm looking for histories of technology and electrification in the Gilded Age and the political and environmental context. In the vein of Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes, David Nye's Electrifying America, or Jeremy Zallen's American Lucifers, but in addition.

An important and deeply reported story from @joshdinner.bsky.social about the hollowing out of NASA, particularly its science centers, where some current employees now refer to "climate" only as "the c-word." www.space.com/space-explor...

a good use case of the severance procedure for writers would be to spend 75% of time in a "composition" persona and 25% in a "revising" persona, instead of the more natural breakdown of 100% in "expectation of present and future shame" persona

As #UHA2025LA kicks off, I’m happy to share here my most recent piece on the Metropole, on an understudied topic in #urbanhistory #envhist —how different lighting tech’s have affected birds & humans over the centuries & what we can do about it. It’s a dual exposé & call to action Check it out here:

This book is delightful! Funny and practical life lessons for adults & kids, from the point of view of sea creatures.

"So, are mirrored satellites a practical means to produce affordable solar power at night? Probably not. Could they produce devastating light pollution? Absolutely." 10/10 no notes theconversation.com/a-us-startup...

Wrote about some unusual but simple star compass concepts from the navigation writer Tristan Gooley upcoming book The Hidden Seasons. As alienated as we are from nature, it's cool to me that there are still so many ways to align oneself under starlight: the cosmic equivalent of touching grass.

Reading some about medieval astrology and I'm thinking LLMs are horoscopes for tech bros: when the answer is right, it's not from the claimed technical mechanism, whether calculations of planetary motion or machine intelligence. It's from deep intuition into the structure of desired answers.

Having just closed The Story of CO2 I'm dazzled by how profoundly Copernican it is. You could say this of the "deep time" genre generally, but to me what Pete offers here is perspective; a disorienting re-centering of the familiar world to the reference frames of thermodynamics and the carbon cycle.

"It’s a study in the perils of relying on the ultrarich to fund science: when the guy with the billions is ready to move on, the whole project is off." Remember Breakthrough Starshot, which was supposed to send a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri? By @sarahscoles.bsky.social in SciAm 🧪🛰️

I'm so goddamn excited to read this book. @peterbrannen.bsky.social's first book THE ENDS OF THE WORLD is one of my favorite books on natural history, & I'm sure this new one is at least as good. @jaimealyse.bsky.social's review is (unsurprisingly) excellent. Go read it, and then get Peter's book!

In one week my book about carbon comes out, and here's some nice things some nice people have said about it. If you feel moved to do so, the link below provides a means of purchase. Thank you, that is all. www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

Aussie folks! 🔭🧪 Please consider signing this petition being put forward to the Australian Govt. to legislate / regulate light pollution and dark sky preservation. Not only are we being robbed of the glorious night sky, other beings (see below) use the stars too! www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

Impressed that this is a national piece but it captures what feel like fundamentally NC and Chapel Hill vibes -- the little mentions of ambient nature, the "esse quam videri"-ish interest in earnestness and authenticity, a patrician but public-minded fussiness, the worldbuilding around basketball.

Okay so White House now saying spaceports+ rocket launches+ reentries don't need environmental review, while FCC is saying that spacecraft in space don't either, so yeah I guess officially all physical stages of space stuff just occur...nowhere? In a hidden "frontier" dimension? Terra nullius?

Refreshing this space enviro news: Trump admin is "modernizing" rules to make clear that licensing new satellites (by the hundreds/thousands; with bus-sized dimensions) is not a "major federal action" that requires environmental review because any effects, they claim, are outside of US territory.

News: Trump’s FCC wants to widen the (already huge) loophole that companies like SpaceX use when they want to launch tens of thousands of satellites while dodging environmental review studies. I’m busy with book revisions, but would happily chat with interested journalist friends. Thoughts below.

News: Trump’s FCC wants to widen the (already huge) loophole that companies like SpaceX use when they want to launch tens of thousands of satellites while dodging environmental review studies. I’m busy with book revisions, but would happily chat with interested journalist friends. Thoughts below.

Unappreciated downside of working from home with a cat is that on rainy days especially, or just days in general, your coworker is constantly rearranging themselves into new advertisements of how cozy it would be to quit everything and curl up into yourself.

Interesting to me how Happy Gilmore is powered by the fun of a blue-collar guy sticking it to entitled country clubbers who play a silly exclusive sport, but then Sandler, in his own entitled, coasting phase but still halfheartedly playing blue-collar, made Happy Gilmore 2 so pro-establishment.

STRATA is officially out in the world today! Very grateful to @wwnorton.com for publishing this book, and to @sarahmgilman.bsky.social for gracing the pages with her beautiful illustrations. So looking forward to sharing this with readers! Find upcoming events here: laurapoppick.com

Thrilled to have an excerpt from STRATA in Rolling Stone today! Fulfilling my dreams of casting geologists as the rockstars of the scientific world: www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult... Two more weeks til we launch the book! Preorder here: wwnorton.com/books/978132...

I'm getting a fun lesson in Western epistemology in that I, white guy, covered a study that cited the location of a star, a subjective fact confirmed by Indigenous Elders, and now white guys are emailing me to dispute that fact. Fascinating. Sorry, rest of the world over the past few centuries.

"In Northern Dene traditions, children learn through personal responses to challenges, riddles and experiences. Not through questions. Certainly not by being spoon-fed information. And in these matters, Dr. Cannon was functionally a child."

This is so very good.

For anyone else like me who can't get enough of this stuff, a pairing suggestion: you may also enjoy my earlier piece on the *other* known stargazing critters. (Also you will like my book).

“The amazing astronomical abilities of this little creature,” Warrant told me, “are uniquely tied to an entire alpine world.” I wrote in Science about a new study on bogong moths, which have neurons in their brains that seem to recognize the Milky Way and infer due south from its orientation.

I wrote about an ancient whole-sky constellation, the worldview behind it, and the decision of Elders to share it with an outsider. Genuinely some of the most powerful work to come from the discipline of cultural astronomy in recent years. Gift link:

"Astronomers eager to use the Rubin Observatory frequently talk about the value of just looking at the universe. Basic research is a public good...that can provide new insight into our history while improving our shared future." @rboyle31.bsky.social 🔭🧪 www.scientificamerican.com/article/bloc...

" Embracing a vision of the future that counts on the worst version of ourselves, doing the worst things we can imagine, lets us off the hook of doing the hard work of dreaming up and working toward the futures we want." slate.com/technology/2...

After its recent Pulitzer win, I just read Every Living Thing, a biography of rivals: Linnaeus and Buffon. The scope seems small, if masterful. Then you realize it's not small. Linnaeus "winning" had huge (and bad) consequences for 1) race science, 2) evolution, 3) Western relationships with nature.

Just got a chance to cozy up with Lizzie Wade's APOCALYPSE, a jaunt through archeology and history that bundles up cool discoveries into a convincing argument that apocalypses are more than just the end of the world.

Having spent much of my science journalism career emailing astronomers has given me totally unreasonable standards of response speed and generosity.

I love this 13th century manuscript illustration so much, because whoever did it is trying to show how ostriches (which they've clearly never seen) care for their eggs by watching the Pleiades (ditto). digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/ecf9...

NEW: Behind closed doors, the Trump administration has mounted a “maximum pressure” campaign on a poor African democracy. The objective: push the country to help Elon Musk's Starlink business. www.propublica.org/article/trum...