Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the whole city of Zürich. To opt in to baptism as an adult was to split the wholeness of the community, into believers and non-believers. That would end the assumption which both he and Luther held as dear as the Pope, that all society should be part of the Church in Christendom. So from 1526 Zürich, embittered by the recent Farmers’ War, persecuted Anabaptists to the extent of drowning four of them in the River Limmat, just at the time when the old Church began persecuting champions of the magisterial Reformation. The Anabaptists were harried out of ordinary society. Their one alliance with a magistrate, when Count Leonhard von Liechtenstein allowed them to take over the Moravian town of Nikolsburg and form an established Church professing believers’ baptism, ended abruptly in 1527 on the orders of the Count’s Habsburg overlords; the Habsburgs burned at the stake the would-be Zwingli of Nikolsburg, a former senior academic called Balthasar Hubmaier. Accordingly, radicals began stressing their difference from ordinary society.When they turned to the Bible for guidance, such people noticed quite correctly that early Christians had separated themselves from the world around. The Book of Acts talked of Christians holding all goods in common (see pp. 119–20). ‘Do not swear at all,’ said Jesus Christ (Matthew 5.34). ‘Commit no murder,’ said the Ten Commandments. So radicals looked for the rare corners of Europe where they had a chance to create their own little worlds, in which goods could be held in common, where no one would force them to swear the oaths which governments and magistrates required, or take up the sword when rulers ordered them to. They took a selective view of the demand for obedience in Romans 13.1, infuriating and frightening the superior powers. Many looked back to the nearest thing that ‘Anabaptists’ ever had to a common confessional statement: articles drawn up in 1527 at the Swiss town of Schleitheim, which were insistent on ‘separation from the Abomination’. Their principal author was a former Benedictine monk, Michael Sattler, and it is tempting to see the communal institutions of radicals as a new effort to return to the early Benedictine ideal. Yet one feature was far from Benedictine: it returned radicals to a still earlier Christianity, which had suffered from official persecution. ‘True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter. They must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical but the spiritual,’ wrote the young Zürich patrician Conrad Grebel to Thomas Müntzer, a year before Müntzer, a leader in the 1525 revolts, was cut down by the vengeful soldiers of princes.24 More frightening still for Christendom was that, even after the defeats of 1525, some radicals continued to believe that they needed force to usher in the

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  One model of Anders’s jet was armed with two rocket-propelled missiles, each with a 3.5-kiloton nuclear warhead attached—combined, it equaled about half the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. To fire the weapons, the radar operator in the backseat had to throw a switch, and the pilot in the front seat had to throw his own switch. That’s all it required. Officially, the crew needed an order from the ground, but if Anders and a buddy wanted to start World War III, they could do it on their own. “That’s the Cold War,” Anders told Valerie. “It’s up to us not to screw up.” In February 1957, the Anders family welcomed their first child, Alan. And in July 1958, Valerie gave birth to Glen. Raising a young family in California was idyllic, with the warm weather and abundant culture, maybe too good to be true, so it came as little surprise when Anders got a new assignment: Iceland. Valerie would stay with the kids in California while her husband moved four thousand miles away. Again, Anders’s job was to fly interceptors. This time, he would be going after Soviet bombers, long-range machines that flew missions near Iceland and the North Atlantic designed to test American air defenses. To help avoid starting a world war, his aircraft and others would be armed only with conventional air-to-air rockets, no nukes. Early in his assignment, a Soviet bomber penetrated the eastern edge of Iceland’s Air Defense Identification Zone. Anders and his wingman scrambled into the air, afterburners blazing, and caught up with the Russian plane. Anders positioned his wingman to shoot down the bomber if its pilot gave the Americans any trouble, then flew his F-89 so close he could call out the eye colors of the Soviet crew. The Russians smiled and waved. Anders offered his own American greeting—a middle finger. The Soviet crew kept smiling and waving, then broke back to where they belonged. Low on fuel, Anders returned to base, knowing the incident would be important to American intelligence officers, as it was among the first—if not the very first—intercept of a Soviet bomber in the zone. On the ground, he described the event. “Anything else?” asked a representative of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Anders feared he would be facing some discipline. Still, he had to be honest. “There is something else,” Anders said nervously. “I probably should tell you that, you know…I gave them the finger.” The man smiled. There was no trouble. Anders flew more missions in Iceland, many of them risky, both for the dangerous flying conditions and for the potential conflict with Soviet bombers. Three or four months after Anders flipped off the Russian crew, another pilot in his squadron intercepted a Soviet bomber. This time, the Russians had a response to their American pursuers, and they held it up to their window—a sign printed in English—for the Air Force pilots to see.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “Seven g’s is seven times their weight on Earth, so these one-hundred- fifty-pound astronauts weigh something like one thousand fifty pounds, would be the effect as they are pressed against their couches.” Apollo 8 crashed even harder into the atmosphere. Despite the g- forces making it difficult to move, or even breathe, the ride was smoother than on lift-off, and the astronauts could still look out their windows and see the pink gases of the ionizing atmosphere turn a deeper reddish-blue; to Anders, he and his crewmates looked like flies caught in the middle of a blowtorch flame. In the distance, a Pan Am pilot flying in the darkness from Hawaii to Fiji watched the fireball created by Apollo 8 and estimated its cometlike tail to be more than one hundred miles long. Moments later, at maximum g-force load, the inferno surrounding the astronauts turned pure white as the temperature at the surface of the spacecraft rose to half that of the surface of the Sun. Out his window, Anders saw a terrifying sight—baseball-sized chunks of the heat shield flying off, many times larger than the grain-sized pieces NASA expected— and he waited for the heat to sear through the spacecraft and melt the crew. But Apollo 8 did not melt. Instead, after about a minute of this peak intensity, the onboard computer automatically began to roll the spacecraft. Though the ship had no wings, its designed shape and offset center of mass made it capable of lift if positioned correctly, and now it began to climb a bit back out of the atmosphere, lowering the g-forces and cooling down in the process. “Cabin temperature is still holding real good,” Anders called to his crewmates, sounding a bit astonished and relieved. “Quite a ride, huh?” “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Borman said. Three minutes after losing contact with the spacecraft, Houston began calling to the ship, but CapCom Ken Mattingly couldn’t get through. Apollo 8 had swooped back down for its second grind into the atmosphere. The crew held on. “How much will this one go up, do you think?” Anders asked of the building g-forces. “Three!” Lovell called. Twenty seconds or so later, the spacecraft had been slowed by the atmosphere to suborbital speeds and began rolling one way, then the

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  and thumping in ways it shouldn’t. At the same time, he heard one of the spacecraft’s thrusters fire. Instantly, he was transported back to 1966, when he’d been on duty as CapCom for Gemini 8, the mission that had gone terribly wrong when a thruster could not be shut down, causing the ship to go into a violent and ever-accelerating tumble. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had fought to stay conscious and regain control, which they finally managed by disabling the primary system and firing a set of reserve thrusters. As Anders saw the eight ball on his own spacecraft spin, he believed the same to be happening to Apollo 8. To counteract the rotation, Anders used his hand-controlled thruster, but the ball just kept moving, so Anders added more thrust. Soon the spacecraft was in full rotation, and it was anyone’s guess which way the nose was pointing in the cosmos. By now, Borman had awoken from the commotion. “What the hell’s going on?” he called out. “Stuck thruster!” Anders answered. But what to do? Armstrong and Scott had been in Earth orbit when it happened to them, and they barely made it out alive. Here, 185,000 miles farther away, it might be impossible to pull Apollo 8 out of its tumble and get it pointed back toward home. Anders had stared down Soviet bombers, had landed on sheets of ice in his fighter planes, and always he’d run cool. This scared the hell out of him. He looked back at the eight ball to assess the spin. Now it had frozen and was therefore useless. Yet the spacecraft was still turning—Anders knew it because he could see the cabin rotating against the pattern of sunlit dust motes floating freely inside it. By now, Lovell had called to Anders and Borman that he’d made a mistake by resetting the guidance system. That explained why the eight ball had rotated to its launch orientation. And that explained why a thruster was not the problem. The thruster Anders had heard had fired automatically by program, a coincidence. Furious at Lovell’s mistake, Borman made his way to the control area, but already Anders had begun to fight the spacecraft’s roll. He couldn’t use the seized-up eight ball to judge how to rotate the ship, so he turned to a more ancient indicator the men had on board.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of his vision of 1260, later episodes of mass flagellation were certainly not so benevolent, for, like the earlier campaigns to gather crusader armies, they were often associated with crowds turning in violence on Jewish communities. Yet the spontaneous character remained: these were outbreaks of religious fervour which the Church authorities had done nothing to inspire and which they often found frightening and sought to suppress. Such religious energies could as readily turn against the Church as be absorbed by it. Punishment was thus directed to outsiders as well as to sinful Christians. One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.8 In 1321 there was panic all over France, ranging from poor folk to King Philip V himself, that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers (as if they had not enough misfortune) were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims were lucky enough to be out of reach on that occasion.9 From the mid-twelfth century, a particularly persistent and pernicious community response to the occasional abuse and murder of children was to deflect guilt from Christians by blaming Jews for abducting the children for use in rituals. This so-called ‘blood libel’ frequently resulted in vicious attacks on Jewish communities. Sometimes higher clergy did their best to calm the community hysteria in such cases; sometimes they allowed shrine-cults of the murdered victims to develop. Recurrences of the blood libel persisted into the twentieth century as a blemish on Christian attitudes to Jews, spreading from the West into Orthodoxy in later centuries.10 A PASTORAL REVOLUTION, FRIARS AND THE FOURTH LATERAN COUNCIL (1200-1260) A more complex and positive response to dynamic popular movements emerged at the end of the twelfth century, although in the end it allied itself and indeed helped to structure this ‘formation of a persecuting society’. It produced two great religious leaders, Dominic and Francis. They were utterly different personalities, but they founded in parallel the first two orders of friars (an English version of the word fratres, Latin for ‘brothers’). In 1194 Dominic became a priest in a community in Osma in northern Spain, living under

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  In 1972, the agency would add the word “Defense” to its title and be renamed DARPA.) In September 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which provided billions of dollars for the education of young Americans in science and related subjects. And in October, he opened a space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, which took on the eight thousand workers and $100 million budget of its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Many of its employees were young scientists, engineers, and visionaries. In December 1958, just about a year after Sputnik had launched, NASA announced Project Mercury, a program designed to put a human being into orbit around Earth and return him and the spacecraft safely. Seven brave men were chosen for the task from a pool of military test pilots. They would be known as astronauts—“star sailors”—and would explore the oceans of space. —America elected John Fitzgerald Kennedy president in November 1960. He’d accused Republicans of being weak on defense and Communism, and Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind in production of intercontinental ballistic missiles—a so-called missile gap. According to the nation’s new president, America could not afford to be second to the Russians in anything. On April 12, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy’s inauguration, tracking stations controlled by American intelligence picked up the flight of a Soviet spaceship and detected something startling inside. Minutes later, the Soviet government announced that they’d put the first man into space—whom they called a cosmonaut, or “universe sailor.” And he’d already made a complete orbit around Earth. For the first time, a man had broken the bonds of his home planet. Yet as the twenty-seven-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin whirled around the globe, few knew the extent to which the Soviets had rushed the mission, the myriad risks they’d taken, or the critical tests they’d skipped. Near the 108-minute flight’s end, after reentering the atmosphere, Gagarin’s spaceship began spinning uncontrollably and plummeted toward Earth. He managed to eject and parachute down, unharmed but almost two hundred miles off course. He landed in a field near the tiny village of Smelovka, east of the Volga River in southern Russia, where he was discovered by a woman and a little girl. The girl ran away, startled by the sight of this alien being who had dropped from the sky, but Gagarin waved his arms and called out, “I’m one of yours, a Soviet, don’t be afraid.” He struggled to walk in his space suit but managed to reach the girl and reveal an incredible truth—he had just come from outer space. In 1945, the Soviet Union had lain in ruins. Now, sixteen years later, it had put the first man into orbit around Earth. Gagarin was given a parade in Red Square, an event as big as or bigger than the one held to celebrate the end of World War II.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  —NASA kicked off 1968 by flying Apollo 5 in January, an unmanned test of the lunar module, the landing craft that would shuttle astronauts between the orbiting spacecraft and the lunar surface. The mission used a smaller rocket, and despite a few problems it was classified a success. And then came Apollo 6. It would be just the second test of the Saturn V, a necessary step before NASA would certify the booster for manned flight. Lift-off was proceeding normally on the morning of April 4, 1968, but just a few minutes into the flight, things started to go wrong. The rocket’s first stage began to “pogo”—to shake violently up and down. Pieces of the spacecraft flew off. Later in the flight, two of the five engines on the second stage shut down prematurely. Still, the third stage struggled into orbit, but its engine—the one required to send Apollo to the Moon—failed to reignite. A backup plan was put into effect, but the reentry of the command module into Earth’s atmosphere was too slow to fully test the heat shield. To many at NASA, the ten-hour flight had been a disaster. By the time the Apollo command module splashed down into the ocean, any chance for a lunar landing by the end of 1969 looked to have burned away. “What was illustrated,” wrote The New York Times, “…was the extraordinary difficulty of assuring that every one of the literally millions of components in such an extremely complicated system as the Saturn 5 works perfectly….This fact argues for a slow but sure approach to future Apollo tests, rather than an adventuresome policy aimed primarily at completing the job by the end of 1969.” —On the same day that Apollo 6 went haywire, United States intelligence agencies delivered a report on the Soviet space program. It was marked TOP SECRET and went only to high-ranking government policymakers and top NASA officials. It read: The Soviets will probably attempt a manned circumlunar flight both as a preliminary to a manned lunar landing and as an attempt to lessen the psychological impact of the Apollo program. That much wasn’t news. But the estimate on when it would happen jumped off the page. The report said that 1969 was more likely for this manned circumlunar flight. But the second half of 1968 was entirely possible. NASA had no plans to send men to the Moon in 1968. The soonest they’d be ready to try was mid-1969, when Apollo 10 would orbit the Moon—a test run before Apollo 11 attempted a landing. By that time, a cosmonaut might already have reached the Moon. And that would be more than just the greatest technological achievement in history. It would be a definitive victory for the Soviets in the Space Race. The landing would still matter, of course. But no one ever again would ask, “Can we get there?” By that time, someone else would have answered, “We did.” NASA had little choice but to keep working.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The United States hadn’t even put a man into orbit around Earth; now the president was committing the country to landing astronauts on the Moon, and on an eight-and-a-half year deadline, no less. Even if NASA knew how to fly a man to the Moon—and it did not—it lacked the infrastructure, industry, manpower, and technology required to do it. And yet the president stood there insisting it would be done. And soon. The stakes could hardly have been higher. If America fell short, its failure could not be denied or buried. It would be proof that the nation couldn’t do what its leader said was most important, that its greatest minds had failed, that it might not be the world’s best hope for the future. It would weaken morale at NASA. And it would embolden the Soviet Union, a nation that wouldn’t hesitate to exploit an American embarrassment for propaganda, or press a military advantage. And yet… If NASA could meet Kennedy’s deadline, it would be a statement—to the American people, the Soviets, and the world—that there was nothing the United States could not do if pushed hard enough, that even after losing round after round in the Space Race, falling behind in missiles and bombs, and suffering a humiliation like the Bay of Pigs, the United States could rise in a way no other nation could rise and pull off a miracle. And that’s what Congress seemed to hear as Kennedy kept talking and their applause began to build: that landing a man on the Moon and bringing him back safely might be the single greatest scientific and technological challenge mankind had ever faced, but doing it by the end of the decade was impossible, and it was only by attempting something impossible that a nation could truly know who it was. —While Americans buzzed about Kennedy’s plan, the Soviet Union yawned. It remained far ahead in the Space Race, and had even sent a probe 42.5 million miles away, which had passed by Venus a few days before Kennedy’s speech. In June, Khrushchev bullied Kennedy during a two-day summit in Vienna at which the men discussed Communism and democracy and the relationship between the two superpowers. “Worst thing in my life. He savaged me,” Kennedy told a New York Times writer. “I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.” Four months later, on October 30, 1961, the Soviets exploded a device known as Tsar Bomba over northern Russia. Packing a force of nearly four thousand Hiroshima bombs, it was by far the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated or even built; for the briefest moment, it equaled 1.4 percent of the power output of the Sun. The device’s blast wave orbited the globe three times and its mushroom cloud rose to more than seven times the height of Mount Everest. The ground around the blast site melted and turned to glass, while people fifty miles away were knocked flat.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell’s legs shook so badly he could barely climb from the cockpit. But that experience only confirmed how he felt about death. To him, the only thing guaranteed to a person was the moment. It was the only time one knew he would be there to take in the trees and the sun and the stars, to meet people, make friends, fall in love. But a person couldn’t be in the moment if he worried too much about the future. That meant in order to live, he couldn’t worry about dying. The day after Lovell’s wild flight, he climbed back into the cockpit and took off again. This time, he put the airplane back down just where it belonged. While Lovell was training, Marilyn gave birth to their second child, James Jr. A few weeks later, Lovell watched transfixed as America’s lead rocket designer, Wernher von Braun, appeared on a nationally televised Disney special, Man in Space . Von Braun showed viewers a prototype space suit like the one Americans would wear “when we make the trip to the Moon,” and he revealed his model for a four-stage orbital rocket ship—about the coolest thing any of the 42 million people watching the program had ever seen. For the next two years, Lovell flew jets at sea and trained pilots while Marilyn raised the children in California. In 1957, he applied to the test pilot school at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland. The job of testing experimental aircraft built with the most advanced technology seemed a natural fit. Marilyn backed his decision and packed the Lovells to go. The training program at Pax River lasted for six months. At graduation, Lovell ranked first in his class. His gift from Marilyn was a new daughter, Susan, making them a family of five. Soon after, in 1958, Lovell and some other pilots at Pax River received a telex from a new government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ordering them to a meeting in Washington, D.C. They were to dress in civilian clothes and not tell anyone, including family, where they were going, or even that they were going at all. When he arrived, Lovell joined dozens of other military pilots for a briefing in a government office. Robert Gilruth, head of NASA’s Space Task Group, explained that the agency was looking for astronauts for Project Mercury, a program designed to put a manned spacecraft into orbit around Earth and recover it safely. He laid out NASA’s vision, talking of rockets and capsules and head-spinning speeds. Think things over tonight, Gilruth told the men, then report back tomorrow for more. Some participants questioned the wisdom of abandoning a Navy career to enroll in an astronaut program that hadn’t yet started and might not even exist in a few years. As for Lovell, he could hardly believe his luck. Several days later he was in New Mexico, enduring six days of torturous physical exams.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  She poured herself a scotch on the rocks, sat on a stool at the wood-paneled bar in the family room, and sobbed. In just ten hours, Apollo 8 would disappear behind the Moon. How had she been so confident all this time? Her husband was disappearing behind the Moon . And that meant he might never come home. —At almost exactly two and a half days into the flight, Apollo 8 prepared for just its second—and final—midcourse correction burn of the outbound leg. It would be accomplished by firing four thrusters on the spacecraft, each of which could produce 100 pounds of thrust. That was only the tiniest fraction of the force that had been required to get Apollo 8 off the launchpad, but it was all the vehicle would need for eleven seconds as it refined its line to the Moon. “Okay, stand by,” Borman called to his crewmates. “Burn,” Lovell said. “Burning,” Anders confirmed. Eleven seconds later, it was done. Houston analyzed the telemetry—the correction had been nearly perfect, and it was just a matter of riding the ship for another eight hours until lunar rendezvous. Despite such close proximity, the crew still could not see its target. To all of them, it felt like sitting with their backs to the screen in a movie theater during a terrific thriller. In Houston, the wives began to prepare for when the spacecraft reached the Moon, scheduled for 4:00 A .M . Houston time, when Apollo 8 would attempt a complex maneuver known as Lunar Orbit Insertion, or LOI. Engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists had spent years developing the calculations and determining how to make the maneuver work. But on its face, LOI was easy to understand. At 69 hours into the flight, Apollo 8 would pass just in front of the Moon, missing its surface by only 69 miles. That altitude had been chosen for a reason. On future landing missions, it would be close enough so that the lunar module shuttling astronauts to the lunar surface and back wouldn’t require a massive amount of propellant, but far enough away to make it unlikely that the spacecraft waiting in orbit above would crash into the Moon. If Apollo 8 did not fire its SPS engine—or if the engine failed to ignite—after passing behind the Moon, lunar gravity would cause it to slingshot around the far side and head back to Earth, requiring only minor course adjustments in order to hit its reentry corridor and splash down in the Pacific Ocean. NASA had chosen this free return, figure eight trajectory in case of engine failure or other in-flight problems. But NASA planned for Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon. To enter lunar orbit, the spacecraft had to slow itself down enough to be captured by the Moon’s gravity.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Some had compared NASA’s challenge in finding the entry corridor to throwing a paper airplane into a public mailbox slot—from a distance of four miles. There was almost no margin for error. If the spacecraft came in too steep, it would grind too hard into the atmosphere, causing massive g-forces that would crush the ship and crew, and generating heat so intense it would incinerate the men and turn Apollo 8 into a burning meteor. If it came in too shallow, it would bounce off the atmosphere like a stone skipped on water and coast back out into space. Without the service module, Apollo 8 lacked any means of propulsion and could not apply the brakes sufficiently to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. At that point, each astronaut would have a chat with his wife and children before drifting away from Earth in a ship with only a few hours’ life support, to embark on a long elliptical orbit, one that would be fatal. But even if the spacecraft hit the entry corridor perfectly, the friction created by the drag of the atmosphere on an object moving at almost 25,000 miles per hour would generate temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. To enable the astronauts to survive it, the command module had been covered by a heat shield made of a reinforced phenolic resin injected into a fiberglass honeycomb. Rather than defeat the heat in combat, the shield was designed to succumb to it and then vaporize away, leaving a new layer of shield beneath to continue the fight, all while keeping the command module cool. Even if it worked and the astronauts weren’t fried to a crisp, they would be undergoing tremendous g-forces as the atmosphere slowed the ship. They would also lose all communications with Earth as gases around the spacecraft ionized from the shock wave, creating a kind of wall through which radio signals could not pass. To mitigate the fantastic amount of heat and g-forces caused by reentry, Apollo 8 wouldn’t simply plunge through the atmosphere; rather, it would use its aerodynamic design (its slightly off-center weight distribution turned the spacecraft into a kind of wing), allowing it to achieve lift and dip up and down, extend its path, shed velocity, and diffuse the heat that it had to endure as it aimed for the designated landing site. The whole process would take about five minutes. If all went well, the spacecraft would have slowed enough to make its final drop to Earth. The astronauts’ lives would then depend on the command module’s parachute system, and the recovery forces that even now moved back and forth in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii like predatory big cats on the hunt. —One hour remained until reentry. It was before dawn at the splashdown site, about a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. It would still be dark when Apollo 8 arrived.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  For the next several days, many of NASA’s top managers and engineers stepped up their already intense schedule and worked around the clock to study the viability of Low’s plan, looking for any showstoppers and keeping it a secret from the wider organization. A few days later, they were convinced: It would take a near miracle, but every problem could be solved, every challenge could be met. Now it was time to go to NASA’s top boss, James E. Webb, for permission. Some at NASA doubted that Webb would even listen. The Apollo 1 fire had nearly put him and the agency out of business, and it seemed unlikely he’d risk another tragedy. But they had to make their pitch now if the agency was to have any hope of sending Apollo 8 to the Moon by year’s end. The job of seeking official permission fell to Webb’s deputy, Thomas Paine, a young, forward-thinking engineer, and to Air Force general Samuel Phillips, director of the Apollo Manned Lunar Landing Program. Phillips at first wanted to do it in person but then thought better of it—a sudden trip to Vienna by high-ranking officials of the American space program might tip off the Soviets that NASA was planning something big. The better idea was to use a secure telephone line and hope for the best. Paine and Phillips reached Webb at the American embassy in Vienna. They had reason to hope Webb would see the genius of the new plan. Since Kennedy’s speech in 1961, Webb had been a champion for Apollo, protecting and advancing the program with Congress, playing by street rules when necessary. So the men laid out their vision for Apollo 8. “Are you out of your mind?” Webb yelled. He began to count off the risks of sending Apollo 8 to the Moon in December, only to grow more indignant with each one, and his list didn’t seem to end. “You’re putting the agency and the whole program at risk!” Webb finally said. And it was hard to argue with any of it. Three astronauts had died a horrific death on the launchpad less than two years earlier. Congress would not abide another three dead, especially if it occurred because NASA had hurried. And Webb added a final point. “If these three men are stranded out there and die in lunar orbit, no one—lovers, poets, no one—will ever look at the Moon the same way again.” No one had considered that. But it was true of Christmas, too. Borman, Lovell, and Anders would be in lunar orbit on December 25. If they died then, Christmas would never be the same in America. Or maybe in all the world. Every year, it would be a tragic reminder of a mission gone horribly wrong. Webb had little to gain by signing his name to such a risky plan. And though he hadn’t announced it, he planned to resign in a few months, ending his seven-year tenure at NASA.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of Megiddo, they were more exposed to the commerce and activities of great powers to the south and north, so they were more cosmopolitan and more inclined to take an interest in other cultures and religions than were the rather introverted rulers of Judah, who resentfully guarded their Jerusalem Temple for Yahweh. Nevertheless both kingdoms produced kings prepared to experiment with the gods of more powerful people who might be allies or overlords. The time of the Judges and then of David and Solomon had coincided with weakness in Egypt and an Assyrian monarchy which was preoccupied in another direction; these circumstances may have afforded opportunity for the brief success of the united kingdom of Israel. From the mid-eighth century, the Mesopotamian empire of Assyria was ready to intervene more actively in Palestine/Israel, enjoying a third phase in a long history of military success which now spread its power from the Persian Gulf to the frontiers of Egypt. To judge by the inscriptions and imagery of their victory monuments, the Assyrians delighted in the use of terror and punitive sadism to seal their military success. The rise of this horrifying new threat to the north inevitably affected Israel, the northern kingdom, more than Judah. As both the Bible and Assyrian records confirm, Israel suffered frontal assault and destruction by the Assyrians around 722 BCE; thousands of its people were exiled and its political organization disappeared for ever.21 That left the kingdom of Judah standing alone, delivered from total conquest because the Assyrians were distracted by revolts elsewhere, a historical accident which the biblical chroniclers naturally interpreted in terms of divine deliverance. Judah survived for another century and a half, but once more Palestine/Israel had become the object of land-grabbing by external powers and, apart from the century-long interlude of the Hasmonean regime from 167 BCE (see pp. 65–71), that has been the case until modern times. This new reality would have a major impact on Judaism. The gathering crisis for the two kingdoms in the ninth and eighth centuries reinforced the role in Jewish culture and society of figures who presented themselves as mouthpieces of Yahweh, carrying urgent messages for his people: the prophets. The modern meaning of the word ‘prophecy’, relating it to the future, may mislead; in Greek, prophēteia means the gift of interpreting the will of the gods. As ancient Middle Eastern archives rediscovered from the nineteenth century onwards have revealed, Israel was not the only ancient society in the region in which prophets played a major role: long before, in the eighteenth century BCE, they can be found in the Mesopotamian Babylonian kingdom of Mari, and they also appear among the Jews’ then contemporary enemy Assyria. Yet the peculiar circumstances of Israel’s history and the consequent preservation of documents by and about the Israelite prophets

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  After I finished the shower, I dried off and went into the room to find some clothes. “So,” he said. “What took you so long? Get lost on your way home?” “They said it was because of you,” I said, and my voice betrayed a hint of annoyance. “They said I shouldn’t hang out with you.” “What? No, it happens to everybody,” the Colonel said. “It happened to me. They throw you in the lake. You swim out. You walk home.” “I couldn’t just swim out,” I said softly, pulling on a pair of jean shorts beneath my towel. “They duct-taped me. I couldn’t even move, really.” “Wait. Wait,” he said, and hopped out of his bunk, staring at me through the darkness. “They taped you? How?” And I showed him: I stood like a mummy, with my feet together and my hands at my sides, and showed him how they’d wrapped me up. And then I plopped down onto the couch. “Christ! You could have drowned! They’re just supposed to throw you in the water in your underwear and run!” he shouted. “What the hell were they thinking? Who was it? Kevin Richman and who else? Do you remember their faces?” “Yeah, I think.” “Why the hell would they do that?” he wondered. “Did you do something to them?” I asked. “No, but I’m sure as shit gonna do something to ’em now. We’ll get them.” “It wasn’t a big deal. I got out fine.” “You could have died.” And I could have, I suppose. But I didn’t. “Well, maybe I should just go to the Eagle tomorrow and tell him,” I said. “Absolutely not,” he answered. He walked over to his crumpled shorts lying on the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit two and handed one to me. I smoked the whole goddamned thing. “You’re not,” he continued, “because that’s not how shit gets dealt with here. And besides, you really don’t want to get a reputation for ratting. But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends.” And if the Colonel thought that calling me his friend would make me stand by him, well, he was right. “Alaska was kind of mean to me tonight,” I said. I leaned over, opened an empty desk drawer, and used it as a makeshift ashtray. “Like I said, she’s moody.” I went to bed wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and socks. No matter how miserably hot it got, I resolved, I would sleep in my clothes every night at the Creek, feeling—probably for the first time in my life—the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what’s going to happen or when. one hundred twenty-six days before “WELL, NOW IT’S WAR,” the Colonel shouted the next morning.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The computer would calculate the ship’s attitude based on its relative position to those stars and automatically fire the ship’s thrusters in order to keep its position in the desired orientation. It wasn’t just important to be pointed toward Earth; it was important for Apollo 8 to be positioned the right way while it followed that path, especially upon reentry into the atmosphere, when its orientation had to be perfect. Lovell had become a maestro at this job, “shooting” stars, entering data, and aiming the sextant like a concert pianist playing a Steinway. In fact, Lovell had earned the nickname Golden Fingers for his proficiency at punching these keys. But he was human, and not immune to a bad note. Early on December 25, Houston time, Lovell missed a step. He meant to enter Program 23 and then select Star 01. Instead, he entered Program 01 into his computer. An alarm rang out. Suddenly, Apollo 8’s guidance system reset itself, losing all memory of how the ship was oriented in space. As a result of Lovell’s mistake, the guidance system now believed Apollo 8 to be back on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy. No one—not the crew, not the computer, not Houston—knew which way was up anymore. Anders checked the eight ball—the attitude indicator that showed the spacecraft’s orientation relative to the celestial sphere—and saw it moving and thumping in ways it shouldn’t. At the same time, he heard one of the spacecraft’s thrusters fire. Instantly, he was transported back to 1966, when he’d been on duty as CapCom for Gemini 8, the mission that had gone terribly wrong when a thruster could not be shut down, causing the ship to go into a violent and ever-accelerating tumble. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had fought to stay conscious and regain control, which they finally managed by disabling the primary system and firing a set of reserve thrusters. As Anders saw the eight ball on his own spacecraft spin, he believed the same to be happening to Apollo 8. To counteract the rotation, Anders used his hand-controlled thruster, but the ball just kept moving, so Anders added more thrust. Soon the spacecraft was in full rotation, and it was anyone’s guess which way the nose was pointing in the cosmos. By now, Borman had awoken from the commotion. “What the hell’s going on?” he called out. “Stuck thruster!” Anders answered. But what to do? Armstrong and Scott had been in Earth orbit when it happened to them, and they barely made it out alive. Here, 185,000 miles farther away, it might be impossible to pull Apollo 8 out of its tumble and get it pointed back toward home. Anders had stared down Soviet bombers, had landed on sheets of ice in his fighter planes, and always he’d run cool. This scared the hell out of him. He looked back at the eight ball to assess the spin. Now it had frozen and was therefore useless.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On board, the astronauts, seated with their backs to the direction of travel, began to feel the first drag from the atmosphere and could see the dark sky begin to ionize and glow around them. Borman and Lovell might have experienced reentry before, but never at these speeds. They weren’t kidding with Anders anymore. “That’s the airglow we are starting to get, that’s what it is, gentlemen,” Lovell said. The three men braced themselves. “Goddamn,” Borman said. “This is going to be a real ride. Hang on!” Chapter Twenty-Four [image file=Image00007.jpg] THE MEN WHO SAVED 1968The world outside the spacecraft lit up even before the astronauts expected it. “I’ve never seen it this bright before!” Borman told his crewmates. “You got zero point oh-five g yet?” “Zero point oh-five g!” Lovell answered, checking a readout on the console. “Okay, we got it!” Anders called. The spacecraft neared 25,000 miles per hour. “Hang on!” Borman yelled. Out his window, Lovell could see a pink glow turning brighter by the second, and he felt the g-forces building. Temperatures rose fast around the command module as it collided with the atmosphere. The crew could only hope the heat shield would do its job; no manned ship had ever endured the heat loads Apollo 8 was about to experience. A second later, Houston lost contact with the spacecraft as Apollo 8 became enveloped in ionized gas. On CBS, Walter Cronkite narrated over an animated rendering of the command module entering a fiery atmosphere. At their homes, the astronauts’ wives watched the broadcasts, willing their husbands home in these hand-drawn capsules. Inside the spacecraft, the g-forces increased fast. “They’re building up!” Lovell called. “Call out the g’s,” Borman told him. “We’re one g,” Lovell answered. The men’s labored breathing could be heard on their intercom system as the forces multiplied. “Ohhh!” Lovell groaned. “Five!” he called, straining to speak. “Six!” Cronkite explained to the nation what the astronauts were enduring. “Seven g’s is seven times their weight on Earth, so these one-hundred-fifty-pound astronauts weigh something like one thousand fifty pounds, would be the effect as they are pressed against their couches.” Apollo 8 crashed even harder into the atmosphere. Despite the g-forces making it difficult to move, or even breathe, the ride was smoother than on lift-off, and the astronauts could still look out their windows and see the pink gases of the ionizing atmosphere turn a deeper reddish-blue; to Anders, he and his crewmates looked like flies caught in the middle of a blowtorch flame. In the distance, a Pan Am pilot flying in the darkness from Hawaii to Fiji watched the fireball created by Apollo 8 and estimated its cometlike tail to be more than one hundred miles long. Moments later, at maximum g-force load, the inferno surrounding the astronauts turned pure white as the temperature at the surface of the spacecraft rose to half that of the surface of the Sun.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  For all its small area, its geography is complicated. The coast has few decent harbours, and other peoples than the Children of Israel tended to dominate the ones that did exist, so the Jews never became seafarers (and generally made rather negative references to the sea and its creatures in their sacred writings). Along the coast runs a wide fertile plain, backed to the east by a north–south spine of hills which in the north become mountains; Jerusalem sits in the middle of the hill country. Before the hills rise to mountains in the north, they curve to the coast, enclosing the Kishon river valley running down to the sea. Through this curve of hills there is only one major north–south pass, guarded by an ancient strongpoint now called Megiddo. This is the chief passage point for land traffic from Egypt north-east to all the lands of the Middle East and beyond, especially the successive civilizations which rose and fell around the great rivers of Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates. It is not surprising, therefore, that the great powers of the ancient world repeatedly fought over such a strategic place. This geographical accident has given the Holy Land a major international importance, to its inhabitants’ misfortune. Such was the accumulated weight of memory of those contests between great powers at Megiddo that it came to symbolize the place of ultimate battles: Christians will know it better from their own sacred writings as Armageddon, singled out by the writer of Revelation as the setting for the ultimate cosmic conflict between the forces of evil and divine goodness.2 On its long eastern flank, the spine of hills falls away into the spectacular valley of the Jordan river, which flows from north to south. That river boundary was rich with symbolism for the Jews, who remembered it as the barrier which they had to cross into their Promised Land. Towards the river’s northern end is a major lake, the Sea of Galilee, around which lay the communities which were home to Jesus and his early disciples. At its southern end, the river does something very strange: it flows into and ends in the Dead Sea, a huge landlocked lake, much bigger than the Sea of Galilee. Here the heat of the arid, rocky valley is such that millions of gallons of Jordan water rushing into the lake evaporate, needing no other outlet and leaving the water so exceptionally salty as to bear up the most helpless of non-swimmers. Water is indeed a constant concern throughout Israel/Palestine: deserts stretch to the south into the Sinai peninsula and to the east beyond the hills of Transjordan, and the further south one travels anywhere in the land, the less rain there is. Most winds bearing rain come west from the sea, and winds from the eastern deserts bear a deadly, parching heat. Summer is a time to dread: spring harvest time is over and there is always the fear that no rain will fall to make the next year’s growth possible. The generally fragile fertility of the soil is a preoccupation of its people; it was one of the distinctive features of the Jews that they became fiercely opposed to rival

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  conquests which combined fervent religious commitment with enthusiasm for their own scaled-down version of Hitler’s murderous racism. In Slovakia, the recovery of Slovak identity had been led by Catholic clergy, and was consciously directed against a new Czech domination after 1918. When Hitler destroyed Czechoslovakia, the Slovakian puppet regime he installed was led between 1939 and 1945 by Monsignor Jozef Tiso, who continued to act as a Catholic parish priest during his presidency, and was responsible for implementing deportations of Jews and Roma (gypsies) at Nazi bidding. In Croatia, Ante Pavelić ran a self-consciously Catholic regime, devoted to ridding a multi-ethnic state of Jews, Roma and Orthodox Serbs (though, curiously, not of Protestants or Muslims). His sadistic methods shocked even the Nazis. Nor did the Catholic Church condemn the forced conversions of the Orthodox which were part of Pavelić’s programme. A Franciscan friar, Sidonje Scholz, visited concentration camps, offering Serbs conversion or death. When he was killed by Serb resisters, the newspaper sponsored by Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb described Friar Scholz as a ‘new martyr who died in the name of religion and for Catholic Croatia’. A significant number of Catholics in neighbouring Slovenia were sickened by the Croatian atrocities and drew up a protest demanding public condemnation from the Pope; it reached the Vatican in 1942 and had no public result.62 Similar very explicit reports from Polish church leaders about Nazi outrages against the population of occupied Poland likewise left the Vatican uncomfortably wrestling with the problem of how best to make a public response. In German-occupied Ukraine, where religious life much revived once the Red Army had been thrown back by German armies, nationalism also took religious lines, but in a terrible new combination of forces. The toxic effect of Nazi occupation was to set Pole against only recently self-identified Ukrainian, with the bizarre effect that Greek Catholic Ukrainians allied with Orthodox Ukrainians against the Roman Catholic Poles who shared Greek Catholics’ allegiance to Rome – thus over-turning the alignments and antipathies of the previous three centuries. In the contested territory of Volhynia, lately Polish- administered, in 1943 Ukrainians were able amid mutual genocidal conflict to identify Polish Roman Catholics because the Poles observed Christmas earlier than either Greek Catholics or Orthodox. The Poles were generally holding their Christmas celebrations in wooden churches, which burned easily, and anyone escaping these infernos was shot. Overall, around seventy thousand Poles died throughout the Ukraine in this violence, and twenty thousand Ukrainians.63 The case of France and its Catholicism continues to be a source of national agonizing. When in 1940 the French army fell to a devastating German attack,

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Randall hemorrhaged off and on for the rest of his life. Years later we learned that he suffered from a rare birth defect. A vein intended to route blood to his heart dead-ended in his stomach. His body produced a network of tiny capillaries to ferry the blood supply. It was an ingenious work-around, but from time to time the network ruptured. At first the blood showed up as dark patches in his stool, subtle and easy to miss. Then the blood began to engorge his belly and there was nothing to do but wait and pray for a miracle. Once the hemorrhage reached critical mass, blood spewed from his lips. I remember the splattered chaos of that blood and the fear that came with it, long urgent journeys through the night with the car windows open and the heavy, honeysuckled air of the South pressing down upon us like the left hand of God. The events I witnessed and the stories about these events have intertwined to form a single thread of memory. Sifted and shaped over time by the adults around me, my recollections have distilled into a mythology of faith, hard to believe, harder still to deny. Here is what I think I know: Randall was sick most of his life, he came close to death again and again, and his father refused to let him go. It was his father’s voice, his father’s faith that tethered him to life. That’s what Randall believed. That’s what we all believed.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  illustrate their concept of an availability cascade, the Alar incident, known to detractors of environmental concerns as the “Alar scare” of 1989. Alar is a chemical that was sprayed on apples to regulate their growth and improve their appearance. The scare began with press stories that the chemical, when consumed in gigantic doses, caused cancerous tumors in rats and mice. The stories understandably frightened the public, and those fears encouraged more media coverage, the basic mechanism of an availability cascade. The topic dominated the news and produced dramatic media events such as the testimony of the actress Meryl Streep before Congress. The apple industry sustained large losses as apples and apple products became objects of fear. Kuran and Sunstein quote a citizen who called in to ask “whether it was safer to pour apple juice down the drain or to take it to a toxic waste dump.” The manufacturer withdrew the product and the FDA banned it. Subsequent research confirmed that the substance might pose a very small risk as a possible carcinogen, but the Alar incident was certainly an enormous overreaction to a minor problem. The net effect of the incident on public health was probably detrimental because fewer good apples were consumed. The Alar tale illustrates a basic limitation in the ability of our mind to deal with small risks: we either ignore them altogether or give them far too much weight—nothing in between. Every parent who has stayed up waiting for a teenage daughter who is late from a party will recognize the feeling. You may know that there is really (almost) nothing to worry about, but you cannot help images of disaster from coming to mind. As Slovic has argued, the amount of concern is not adequately sensitive to the probability of harm; you are imagining the numerator—the tragic story you saw on the news—and not thinking about the denominator. Sunstein has coined the phrase “probability neglect” to describe the pattern. The combination of probability neglect with the social mechanisms of availability cascades inevitably leads to gross exaggeration of minor threats, sometimes with important consequences. In today’s world, terrorists are the most significant practitioners of the art of inducing availability cascades. With a few horrible exceptions such as 9/11, the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of death. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The difference is in the availability of the two risks, the ease and the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As I know from experience, it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm. Terrorism speaks directly to System 1.