Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from WIRED space writer Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
I have some unfortunate news to share: A tsunami of layoffs swept through WIRED, and I am among the victims. The majority of the science desk was gutted, and the features, business, and gear teams all lost talented writers and editors. The magazine lost two thirds of the union’s diversity committee, including me, as well as other people of color on staff.
I’m disappointed that the parent company imposed these layoffs right after we celebrated WIRED’s 30th birthday at LiveWIRED last week and right before the holidays. I’m proud of the session I moderated at the San Francisco LiveWIRED event, and you can watch the video here.
I’m grateful for so much support from my colleagues, friends and family, and from the WIRED community. Science journalism has been at WIRED’s core for decades, but it looks like they won’t be investing in that as much anymore. Hope I wasn’t the magazine’s last space writer. Now I’m moving on and I’m taking my skills and ideas elsewhere. And in the meantime, I’ll keep writing here.
I’m immensely proud of the award-winning and influential work my colleagues and I produced over the past few years. I wrote about the black carbon cost of rocket launches, the resilient Voyager spacecraft, the ongoing risk of nuclear weapons, space weapons, space politics, space music, space archaeology, space psychology, Star Trek, and yes, the new season of Futurama.
Here’s some others’ recent writings I recommend too:
“An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life“ by Jaime Green in The Atlantic
“The Hofmann Wobble” by Ben Lerner in Harper’s
“City of Glass” by Ben Goldfarb in bioGraphic
“How the Media Greenwashes the Fossil Fuel Industry” by Amy Westervelt & Matthew Green in The Nation (in partnership with other outlets)
What I’m reading: Fiasco, a novel by Stanisław Lem.
Looking back: Six years ago this month, I wrote for The Atlantic, asking, “Is Planet Nine Even Real?” I could be wrong, but I’m still skeptical that that hypothetical world exists.
Hope you all enjoy Shabe Yalda (the winter solstice), Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. I’ll be back in 2024.
More about me: I’m a science writer and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter and Bluesky. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.