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The classic “Blue Marble” image of the Earth, taken by the Apollo 17 crew on Dec. 7, 1972. (Courtesy NASA)
The classic “Blue Marble” image of the Earth, taken by the Apollo 17 crew on Dec. 7, 1972. (Courtesy NASA)

Marina Koren on Rethinking the “Overview Effect”

February 13, 2023
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Marina Koren, who covers science and space exploration as a staff writer for The Atlantic, realizes her job doesn’t sound real. “But I promise it is,” she says. “When I tell people I’m a ‘space reporter,’ they’re not quite sure what to do with that. But space is a beat.”

It’s a beat, indeed—one she delivers to the masses, or at least to those of us who read The Atlantic, through her concise, clarifying, and entertaining writing. Since January 2017, beginning with a piece about then-president-elect Donald Trump’s space policy, Koren has written hundreds of articles about the cosmos. Shaping necessary and essential stories around these new frontiers, she has focused on subjects ranging from astronaut DNA, to space mice, to the aesthetics of spaceflight, to asteroid deflection. For The Atlantic’s January/February 2023 issue, Koren wrote a salient piece about the “overview effect,” the cognitive shift that can occur when seeing the Earth from outer space—a subject she and I discuss at length on the latest episode of our At a Distance podcast, excerpted below.

More recently, Koren put together an online feature titled “The Existential Wonder of Space,” an effort that makes humanity’s ongoing giant leaps into space eerily, presciently personal. Built into the piece is a sort of “space calculator” based on your birth year (in my case, 1985). It tells me I’ll be 49 when the Dragonfly mission reaches Titan; that I could ride Disney World’s Space Mountain 1,929,530 times by 2034; that I’ll be 84 when a radio transmission from Earth in 1999 reaches a star in the constellation Cygnus; that I could listen to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” 4,639,780 times by the time that same Cygnus call is delivered; and that I’ll be 63 “when a full moon coincides with a leap day, a rare, once-in-a-century event.” Doing what Koren does best, the piece playfully makes the universal—or, to be more exact, the universe—personal.

Here, a condensed and edited version of my conversation with Koren.


Click here to listen to the full interview on our At a Distance podcast.

Marina Koren. (Courtesy The Atlantic)
Marina Koren. (Courtesy The Atlantic)

Let’s start with your approach to the space beat. What does your job entail?

It’s a beat like any other. There are powerful institutions to hold accountable. Those institutions are NASA, for example, or SpaceX, or Blue Origin. And they have interesting stories worth covering.

I approach it in two ways: There’s the spaceflight side of things—human spaceflight. What SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing, and what NASA is trying to do with putting humans on the Moon for the first time since 1972—so many fascinating stories there. And then there’s the category of space science, which is: astronomers and planetary scientists, and what they’re doing to learn more about the planets and moons in the solar system and beyond that—work on stars and galaxies, and the Big Bang, how far back into the universe.

It’s a big beat, basically. [Laughs] I just try to cover the universe as best as I can.

You recently wrote a piece headlined “Seeing Earth From Space Will Change You,” about the “overview effect.” Frank White coined this term in the early ’80s. Could you share a bit about who he is, and also how and why he came up with that term, and what it means?

In the early to mid-’80s, Frank White was on a cross-country flight, and he was doing what a lot of us probably do on a plane, which is staring out the window and having way too many existential thoughts about the meaning of life and our own individual lives. He was already a big sci-fi fan, and he realized, as he looked out the window of the plane, that future generations of human beings might be way more advanced than we are, and they might live off-world in space stations of some kind, orbiting Earth. Their view would always be of Earth from afar, and they might have certain insights that would otherwise take people a lot more time to have if they remained earthbound. To him, this was something really magical, having this overview effect, seeing Earth from afar, as it really is. He hypothesized that, for the average person, that must change the way you think, it must be profound, it might be overwhelming, it might shift peoples’ perspectives.

So, to test his hypothesis, White decided to start interviewing astronauts. He started noticing patterns in these conversations. They would report being overwhelmed by the beauty of the earth, being struck by how fragile and thin the atmosphere was, and how that was all that separated us from the great, mysterious, even scary beyond. So that idea really took off.

I can’t remember the first time I heard about the overview effect. But for me, it was always a thing that I knew existed and was a given. And I was interested to learn that it’s not exactly one size fits all.

You describe it as this cultural and celestial phenomenon. Could you speak to both of these aspects of it, the cultural and the celestial?

There is a great space historian at the University of Chicago, Jordan Bimm, who has written perhaps the only critique of the overview effect, which just goes to show how ingrained this idea is in our culture. He and I have talked about this a lot. He sparked the idea for the piece in the magazine, about how the way that we sometimes talk about the overview effect, it almost sounds like it’s this gift that the universe bestows on people who happen to reach orbit. As if it’s a natural side effect of being in space. But Jordan argues that that’s not the case—the way that people react to that sight really depends on their backgrounds and their training. If you’re looking at NASA astronauts, these people who go to space are products of their place in time. So the reactions that they might have—while there are potentially some common themes, and of course it’s difficult not to be wowed by the sight—but when you get into more of the details of peoples’ responses, those are really informed by their life experience.

For example, Hayley Arceneaux is a physician’s assistant who went to space a couple of years ago on SpaceX, and she spent a few days in orbit. And when she looked outside of the capsule down at Earth, she saw a borderless world, and there was a sense of unity and connectedness with humankind that a lot of people have talked about. But because of her experience in healthcare, she was really struck by healthcare disparities across the world. For her, seeing Earth as it truly is—beautiful, gleaming, blue—brought that out because of her personal experience. I haven’t found an account from an Apollo astronaut that’s like, “Ugh, healthcare, we’ve really gotta crack down on that flawed system.”

For the piece, you also spoke to William Shatner, famous as Captain Kirk in Star Trek. And he had gone up to space in the fall of 2021, on a Blue Origin flight, at age 90. He told you when he was in orbit that he had these strong feelings of grief related to the climate crisis. What did you make of those views, and do you think his response is the typical one?

It’s become more common in the last few years, maybe the last couple of decades, for even astronauts who go to space, to come home, and when they’re asked about their experience to say, “We really need to take care of planet Earth.” It becomes clear from that high up that this is the only home that we have, and maybe we should stop screwing it up in the way that we have been with climate change. You’re definitely hearing more of those accounts from people. But William Shatner definitely gave the most depressing report back, I think, that most people have heard. Even when I talked to him, we talked a year out from his flight, which I have to remind you lasted three minutes. So the flight, from start to finish, is about ten minutes. But the actual experience of weightlessness and getting a chance to look out the window, that’s three minutes.

We’re talking, it’s a year after his flight, and he was still tearing up on the phone with me because he was still reliving that grief. And he did say that maybe I just caught him on a bad day. He had just read a story about microplastics in the environment that morning, and it was top of mind for him. But I think we’ll be hearing more of those stories. Because if you’re overwhelmed by the sight of Earth and its fragility—it’s just this perfect oasis suspended in this vast nothingness—and then you come back home and climate change is a very real problem, how do you not feel some grief about that? I think it’s an understandable response.

Pulling out a little bit, what impact do you think it would have on the planet if more people in positions of power—particularly executives, politicians, decision-makers—could experience this view of Earth? Do you think something would change? Do you think the overview effect has the power to shift how people think about the Earth, and more importantly, behave and act on Earth?

Yeah, this is such a good question, and it’s one I tried to tackle in my writing.

There are people in positions of power right now who have been to space. The administrator of NASA at the moment is Bill Nelson, who is a former longtime senator. He flew on a kind of PR flight in the ’80s. He did train, but it was more of a way for NASA to kind of secure future funding, by inviting a member of Congress into orbit. I’ve talked to him before about how his spaceflight changed him. He said that it definitely made him more environmentally conscious, which is not a radical thing to say—he’s a Democrat.

So I think, as more people go into space—and experience the overview effect, whatever that means to them—will that lead to a meaningful change on Earth? I don’t know. I feel cynical. But there are a couple of things here. Yes, more people are going into space right now because of the commercial space business. But we’re not going to be seeing exponential growth. I think it’ll still be maybe a dozen people going to the edge of space once a year, and maybe four people going into orbit once a year.

Only six hundred or so people have been to space so far, and that’s a small number in human history. And most of those people have been astronauts who are paid federal government salaries, and they can’t really do much. The astronauts that I’ve talked to, they’ve said that they recycle more, maybe they consider solar panels when they’re building a new home, but there’s nothing they can do on a bigger scale. So it is exciting that more executives and billionaires and important people are going up. I think Jeff Bezos has donated quite a bit of money to climate change efforts since his spaceflight. Which is great. But he could have done that before going to space.

One academic said something that has really stuck with me, and her name is Deana Weibel. She said that you don’t need to go to space to learn basic human empathy, that you might try to teach schoolchildren. That you don’t have to go to space to care about your fellow citizens of Earth. You don’t have to go to space to care about the planet. Certainly, it’s a giant dose of—you’ve been grabbed by the shoulders and shaken. It’s a perspective shift. But you can have that perspective shift on the ground.

Just one final point is that if billionaires want to have this experience, and then come back down and say, “Wow, that was life-changing, that was so profound, I’m going to give back to these causes now,” that’s fantastic. Go nuts. But I’m worried there’s a little bit of a sinister side to that kind of thing. Any rich person now can go to space and come home and say, “Well, I’ve had this profound experience. So this is why I’m gonna do this,” whether it’s selling a product or pushing some type of agenda or narrative, and people will tend to believe them and go along with it, because that person has experienced something that most of us haven’t. We put stock into that. We think, Oh, you’ve had this life-changing, celestial experience. I have to believe what you’re saying. But it’s possible that some of these people are not going to be honest. So I’m worried about that.

How do you think about the overview effect in the context of that famous blue marble image from 1972, taken by the crew of Apollo 17? Fifty plus years later, I think we’ve forgotten how extraordinary that image was at the time. Now it seems sort of mundane with the proliferation of space imagery. Do you think, with more people going up into space, there might also be a similar effect, where you have a lot of people just seeing the same image, where there’s almost an Instagram effect of spaceflight?

Yeah, I’ve wondered about that. And again, I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but that’s a possibility. I think we shouldn’t discount the possibility that someone goes into orbit, sees Earth from space, and is, after a day or two, a little bit underwhelmed. If that sounds unfathomable, consider the fact that there are people who leave one star reviews for National Parks on Tripadvisor. There are people who go to the Grand Canyon, and they’re like, “Ehh, all right, time to go home.” So I don’t want to say that people will be underwhelmed by what they see.

But I think that we are definitely spoiled in a way that people who saw the blue marble picture for the first time are not visually spoiled. We live in a time when special effects are fantastic. You have David Attenborough narrating a nature documentary about CGI dinosaurs. So I do sometimes wonder whether our capacity for awe has changed in that way. I still think that going to space would be just such a brain-scrambling experience, because there are so many physical sensations that go along with it. Especially with a Blue Origin flight. It happens so fast: You’re on the ground; then suddenly, you’re weightless; then you’re back down. Our eyes were not meant to see—they did not evolve to see and process—Earth from that perspective. So it’s very jarring, and I think that can lead to having a meaningful and profound experience. But if you’re in orbit for a week, maybe you kind of… I don’t want to say the view gets old, but it could. And I have talked to astronauts for whom the view didn’t make them that emotional, or as emotional as a non-astronaut might expect. And maybe that’s a personality thing. Chris Cassidy, retired from NASA now, said that he’s a very list-oriented guy. He’s really into getting tasks done. He’s not an emotional person. So he was not overcome with a wave of emotion when he looked out on to Earth.

There’s just such a range of perspectives. The overview effect, it’s a useful framework, but it also kind of flattens the experience in a way that I think we should be rethinking in this era of commercial spaceflight.

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Courtesy Artisan Books

Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray on “Durag Diplomacy” and the Beauty of the Bronx

Over the past decade, the Bronx culinary collective Ghetto Gastro has—through a combination of creative finesse, clever tactics, linguistic gymnastics, and food alchemy—risen up in the worlds of art, fashion, and entertainment, serving up a new, raw form of cultural ambassadorship. Unofficial representatives of their home borough, the group’s co-founders, Jon Gray (the guest on Ep. 2 of our Time Sensitive podcast), Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker, practice what they call “durag diplomacy,” bringing the Bronx to the world and the world to the Bronx. The trio’s scope and impact is vast, from collaborating with French luxury house Cartier on a “Bronx Brasserie” pop-up in Paris, to launching kitchen appliances with Target, to cooking with Wolfgang Puck at this year’s Oscars. An unabashed gastronome and the group’s self-described “dishwasher,” Gray has the agility and energy of a frontman: Currently an artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he’s perhaps best known for his 2019 TED Talk, which has been viewed nearly two million times. Serrao and Walker are seasoned chefs with backgrounds in top restaurants, including at Cracco in Milan and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s now-closed Spice Market in New York, respectively.

A view of the “Slow Show” performance. (Photo: Anne-Sylvie Bonnet)

With “Slow Show,” Choreographer Dimitri Chamblas Emphasizes the Mysterious Power of Slow Movement

What gives a physical movement meaning? There are myriad answers: context, shape, intention. For internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, educator, and creative director Dimitri Chamblas, there’s another, primary answer: speed. “If I go to shake your hand, you would understand because of the movement, but also because of the speed of it. If I do it super fast, it’s an offense. If I do it super slow, you won’t understand where I am going. The identity of the movement is given by the speed of it.”

Courtesy Phaidon

Danish Design Firm HAY Heralds Its 20th Anniversary With a Superb, Highly Tactile Book

While the Danish design firm HAY is just celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, it has achieved a rarefied place in the design lexicon that’s more often associated with brands many decades older. This standing is defined, in part, by being often imitated, yet maintaining a certain level of quality and integrity. HAY originals can always be told apart from those trying to knock it off.

Courtesy Aedes de Venustas

A New Perfume Translates the Greek Island of Corfu Through Kumquat

Growing up in the Midwest, I wasn’t exposed to the widest range of foods. True to the Scandinavian heritage and harsh winters of the region, I remember a hearty, meat-and-starch focused cuisine, one meant to warm and sustain through the cold and dark. As I got older, I started expanding my palate, and I can remember many firsts: my first pho, my first dosa, my first doro wat. But out of all these first experiences of more far-flung tastes and flavors, none stands out in my memory as sharply as my first kumquat.

An array of Baudar’s wildcrafted vinegars. (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Culinary Alchemist” Pascal Baudar on the Art of Foraging and the Craft of Vinegar

Pinning a single job title on the award-winning food expert and forager Pascal Baudar is no easy task. A self-described “culinary alchemist” who cans, dries, smokes, ferments, steams, and pickles cactus buds, harvester ants, and other obscure flora and fauna, Baudar is the go-to source for Los Angeles–based chefs Curtis Stone, Josiah Citrin, and Ludovic Lefebvre, as well as cocktail maestros, including Matt Biancaniello, seeking these delicacies. “The majority of chefs use 30 wild ingredients, maximum,” Baudar says. “We deal with four hundred and fifty-six.”

Courtesy Strange Attractor Press

A New Book Explores How, Via X-Rays, Banned Albums Made It Into the Cold War–Era U.S.S.R.

The bad news is that this particular set of X-rays won’t be covered by your health insurance. The good news? Discarded hospital film of broken bones can defy a communist regime, deliver banned music to the masses, and endure as art.

Photo: John Cairns. Courtesy the Bodleian Libraries.

An Exhibition at Oxford Highlights the Sensorial Splendor of Books

In 1940, Dorothy Kunhardt published a book that would forever change the way young children read. Pat the Bunny, an interactive book full of activities such as touching the sandpaper of “Daddy’s scratchy face,” playing peekaboo with a piece of cloth, or gazing in a mirror, imbued the act of reading with a new form of sensory engagement. Today, “touch and feel” books for babies and children are almost required reading—their cellophane stuffing produces a satisfying, A.S.M.R.-level crunching sound, while the use of faux rabbit fur or horse hair offers an exhilarating tactile experience. As we age and our reading comprehension sharpens, the books we pick up prioritize a single sense—sight—their stories seemingly locked away in lines of text.

The Sculpture Gallery at The Glass House. (Photo: Michael Biondo)

Robert Stadler Has a “Playdate” With Philip Johnson at His Glass House

It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designer-artist-provocateur Robert Stadler along a central pathway on Philip Johnson’s 49-acre Glass House estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. We’ve just exited the property’s whitewashed, brick-floored, glass-ceilinged Sculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Now, for one of the first times ever, a temporary installation by a contemporary artist—Stadler—is being shown among the sculptures of these art-world giants.

Photo: Marco Galloway

Willo Perron’s Debut Furniture Show Makes the Case for a “No Coasters” Design Movement

With everything he does, the Los Angeles–based designer and creative director Willo Perron always considers the macro and the micro. From the L.A. headquarters of Roc Nation, to Stüssy stores around the world (including in Kyoto, Milan, and Shanghai), to the set build-outs for Rihanna’s and Drake’s latest tours, to album art for those same artists, to the branding and art direction for the non-alcoholic aperitif company Ghia, Perron has an adroit ability to work across many scales.

The “shite” (primary performer) in “Makura Jido” (“Chrysanthemum Boy”). (Photo: Yutaka Ishida. Courtesy Japan Society)

Ever Heard of Noh Theater? Our Primer to Three Major Productions Arriving in New York City This Fall

Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketing and temperatures dropping, I decided that a winter fireside with a handful of centennia-old ghost stories (cat in my lap, or reading aloud to a friend) might carry me away from the pandemic—from Brooklyn, 2020—to somewhere entirely distinct.

Cover of “The Seed Detective” (left). Adam Alexander (right). (Courtesy Chelsea Green Publishing)

“Seed Detective” Adam Alexander Imagines a Better World—Through Rare, Endangered, and Unusual Vegetable Varieties

For British author, TV gardening producer, and “seed detective” Adam Alexander, the supermarket serves as perhaps the finest symbol of our modern food systems and their discontents. Of course, there’s undeniable quantitative material abundance, with aisles upon aisles of vegetable varieties—chopped, pickled, canned, and fresh—all that one could imagine within the confines of some idea of a generic palette. But it arrives at a qualitative price, and not just in terms of flavor, but also in context, in our ability to see this food as a part of our own story—as a connection to the land we live on or a cornerstone of the traditions we uphold. Vegetables are more than just so many anonymous pounds on a scale. “This strong connection with the land and what we grow and what we put in our own mouths has been lost, especially in the U.K.,” Alexander says. “To me, it’s really important that we try to reconnect and recognize that these vegetables are part of our human story and, in that way, we can do a lot to serve rare and endangered varieties.”

Courtesy Assouline

Why Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Remains One of the Most Enduring Watches Ever

Designed in 1972, at a time when a luxury watch made of steel was still a radical concept, Audemars Piguet’s nautical-inspired Royal Oak captured the “stealth wealth” style of the moment, mirroring the cutting-edge ethos of the French fashion scene (think: Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, Pierre Cardin), as well as the era’s groundbreaking architecture, such as Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s inside-out postmodernist Pompidou Centre in Paris, completed in 1977. “To me, the Royal Oak is a work of art that happens to be a watch,” says British GQ editor Bill Prince, author of the new book Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon (Assouline), coming out October 12. “It’s one of those works of culture that has managed to cut through time, in the sense that it was born of an era, but it already had the criteria to be bigger than the era.”

Courtesy Olivia Sammons

A New Zine Highlights the Poetry and Beauty of Food

Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.

Courtesy OMA

For a Tiffany & Co. Pop-Up in Paris, OMA Designs a Literal Jewelry Box

Hiring a world-class architecture firm to design a tiny temporary retail space may seem an extravagant choice, but given the high aspirations of Tiffany & Co.—especially now that it’s owned by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH—it makes sense for the American jewelry company’s Paris debut under its new French banner.