Pulled less from recent news and more from my current recreational reading:
Grab your Geiger counter: a trip to Chernobyl’s first rave: Actually more of an art installation, this article is from last fall but given the fresh interest created by the new HBO miniseries I thought it reasonable to include today. I’ve not seen the miniseries (no HBO, besides I doubt I could endure the “puppy scene”) but I’ve had a morbid interest in the catastrophe for years. I recently listened to the podcast [YouTube] about the show, and read the exhaustively detailed Midnight in Chernobyl. I also found a huge deck of photos at Imgur (warning: photos of radiation burns and mutated animals in the last third of the page). Though far from expert, I say with confidence that raving in Chernobyl is still probably a bad idea.
What we know about Ron D. Moore’s For All Mankind so far: What if the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. to the moon? The Space Race would have continued, aiming to be the first to Mars, Saturn, etc. Or at least according to Ron. D. Moore it would. I’m not sure what to make of this – on the one hand I love alternate history, on the other I can’t help but think the series is cynically timed to coincide with the Apollo 11 anniversary.
The Haunting Mystery of the USSR’s Lost Cosmonauts: How is it possible that a conspiracy theory that’s been around long enough for the Smithsonian to address it is something I’m only hearing about now? And from a nail-bitingly intense work of fiction rather than my usual weird sources, curiously enough. I think if the Soviet Union put people in space that they lost they would certainly have lied about it. I just doubt they could have kept it secret after the fall of the USSR. What do you think?