My new Rolling Stone piece, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer and editor Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Before I present my new work, I just wanted to share some thoughts. When it comes to politics, it often seems like we’re living in dire times, and they’re also times of chaos and fights for power. I won’t downplay the long road we have ahead, and the never-ending struggles we have to organize and advocate for a peaceful, livable world. But at this particular moment, I need reason for hope, and I think we have some.
In the US, we’re seeing, if briefly, a passionate interest in politics, with President Biden, who has had a mixed record on climate policy and foreign policy, and who’s extremely unpopular and has almost no chance of victory against Trump, being urged to step aside. While Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t my top choice to replace him, she is a likely candidate, and it looks like she’s at least 4% more popular than Biden—and surely that would improve further if a campaign backing her were to begin in earnest. Former President Trump can and should be defeated in November.
While authoritarianism is on the rise in Europe, we’re seeing resistance against the far-right. In France, the leftist coalition combined with Macron’s centrists soundly triumphed over the xenophobic National Rally party this weekend. And in the UK, the Labour party won in a landslide and will return to power after 14 years of controversial Tory rule. Meanwhile, in Iran, a reformist and a heart surgeon, Masoud Pezeshkian, won over a hard-liner. Pezeshkian has been a critic of Iran’s hijab law and the so-called morality police, showing that women’s rights remain a top priority in the country, and he appears to support diplomacy with the West. We’re also seeing positive signs from Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, soon to be sworn in as the country’s first female president.
Turnout was historically low in both the UK and Iranian elections though, a sign of widespread voter dissatisfaction with the government in both countries. That’s not the case in France, which had a much higher turnout than previous elections. The French left showed how to stop neo-fascists from taking power: You offer an inspiring alternative vision. In France’s case, the leftist coalition called for raising the minimum wage, building more affordable housing on a large scale, and capping the prices of essential foods and utilities, among other things.
Time to Take Out the Space Trash
Rocket bodies and other spacecraft regularly drop out of orbit and sometimes fall from the sky, creating a new environmental problem for fans of space exploration. The biggest culprits include SpaceX and the Chinese space program, but there’s plenty of blame to go around. This piece was a long time in the making, and I’m glad I could write it for Rolling Stone magazine. Hope you all enjoy reading it.
I also write here about an emerging concern, that when all this space junk and rockets burn up in the atmosphere, they pollute the area and threaten the ozone layer. I was also recently interviewed about this issue for Canada’s CBC News.
Astronauts Face Health Risks Even on Short Trips to Space
For years, space companies have been claiming they’re doing science, as a way to boost their legitimacy vis-a-vis NASA and other space agencies. And I’ve been asking, where’s the science then? Well finally some new research using data from commercial spaceflights came out, and I wrote about it here for Science magazine.
In other writing…
Can we exhume gender from the long dead? by Sabrina Imbler in Defector
The insulin empire, by Edward Ongweso Jr. & Athena Sofides in The Baffler
The unknown toll of the AI takeover, by Lois Parshley in The Lever
The age of the drone police is here, by Dhruv Mehrotra & Jesse Marx in WIRED
Selling a mirage, by Lisa Song in ProPublica, about fossil fuel companies’ myth of “advanced” plastic recycling
What the Challenger disaster proved, by Emma Sarappo in The Atlantic
Barred owls blur lines between invasive species and refugees, by Isobel Whitcomb in Atmos magazine. I also recommend The Owls Who Came From Away, by Jude Isabella in Hakai magazine
What I’m reading: The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger, published by Jacobin, with an introduction by historian Greg Grandin
Looking back: Eight years ago, I wrote in the San Jose Mercury News about dangers of BPA, which was ubiquitous in plastics, and similar health effects detected with the chemical’s proposed replacements. (I wrote more about this later for Undark magazine.)
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.