Readership Capture

The Atlantic today:
Maybe We Don’t Need to Go to Space Anymore
Trump wants to slash NASA’s budget. A Real World star will lead the agency. But everything’s okay!
By Alexandra Petri
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— Frank Amari (@frankamari.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 9:05 PM

Not sure y’all know blog favorite Petri has switched from WaPo to the Atlantic…

Sure, NASA is set to reduce its workforce by at least 2,145 employees, most of them senior-level and with expertise that will be extremely hard to replace. Sure, Sean Duffy, the former Real World cast member currently serving as secretary of transportation (which seems like a more-than-full-time job already) is now also the interim head of NASA. Sure, the Trump budget aims to slash NASA’s funding to the level it was several years before we sent anyone to the moon. The Senate is trying to preserve the budget, but—must it? It’s okay! We didn’t need to go to space again anyway! What’s in space? Nothing. Void, vacuum, Laika’s vengeful ghost, dust, gas, rocks, old Voyagers, a couple of gold records, thousands of Starlink satellites blotting out the view of the stars. It’s not like we haven’t been up there before. Going to space is much too ’60s. The whole theme of the Trump administration is undoing things we did in the 1960s, such as “end polio” and “enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.”

To anyone who says, “I don’t think a former reality-TV star should be in charge of NASA,” I say: Why does NASA deserve any better than the rest of the country?

Indeed, there might be some benefits associated with bringing Real World sensibilities to NASA. Previous administrators would have wasted money trying to actually get to space, instead of entertaining cost-saving ideas such as faking it on a soundstage and giving a press conference where you belligerently insist that you have already landed on Mars but the Fake-News Media just didn’t see it. (The saved money can be used to deport people, preferably people who came here hoping to do science for us because we were a “nice place” with “freedoms.” In a sense, deportation is a kind of space travel. El Salvador is in space.)…

… I got a look at new missions being contemplated by Duffy’s combined Department of Transportation/NASA, and they are, frankly, a little bleak:

– Fake a moon landing, but on a much worse, dinkier soundstage this time.

– Communicate with extraterrestrial life, but in a hostile, careless way that compels them to immediately attack Earth.

– Space tariffs???

– For the next mission, astronauts will fly to Cincinnati and back, coach class…

Readership Capture Open Thread: Alexandra PetriPost + Comments (32)

The great Mel Brooks is 99 years old today. His next project is a forthcoming sequel to 1987’s Spaceballs, which reportedly will bring the also-wonderful Rick Moranis out of retirement. (Moranis left acting, other than the occasional voice role, after his wife died – his kids needed him.)

Comedy doesn’t always age well, but my hunch is that Brooks’s will endure about as well as comedy can – he’s on a par with the Marx Brothers, and maybe even Bugs Bunny, in the American comedy pantheon. He has a finely-tuned sense of the absurd, enjoys sending up social pieties, and he’s never cruel. His work is generous to the genres it lampoons.  He has been generous to other artists, too: he produced, among many other things, both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg’s The Fly. And he ran interference for both those directors when it came to studio meddling:

He is also a member of the “EGOT” club – he’s won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony.

I could load up this post with dozens of great clips of his stuff from YouTube. I’m just going to share this one I saw today for the first time: Brooks and his wife, the stone-cold fox Anne Bancroft, singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” together on a British variety show in 1983.

Just, you know, in Polish.

Enjoy, and may Mr. Brooks live another hundred years. Share your favorite lines or clips from this great American original in the comments.

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Respite Open Thread: The 99-Year-Old ManPost + Comments (79)

it's my birthday and as a treat I turned the AC down to 70 from 78

— Cake or Death (@johngcole.bsky.social) June 22, 2025 at 1:36 PM

Happy Birthday, Blogmaster!Post + Comments (86)