One of the best new Instagram accounts of 2015 returned this weekend after a three-month hiatus. Here’s a season-shifting shot of an irrigation circle near the tiny town of Ferron, Utah:
Update: Another one this afternoon, from Kimball, Nebraska:
Love that tiny red accent.
(See all Orbital Views here)
Well, 2015 was quite a year. Thanks to a handful of astronauts and high-tech cameras , we’ve been able to watch it pass through beautiful orbital views of Earth, from its deep-green rain forests and royal-blue oceans, to its gray concrete jungles and cityscapes.
For the last Orbital View of this year, let’s go with an oldie but a goodie.
This photo was captured by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, and was the first photograph taken of the whole round Earth.
Happy New Year.
The pale blue dot sure is beautiful up close—close being the surface of the moon, about 238,900 miles away.
This photo, released by NASA Friday, is a composite of images captured in October by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009, photographing the features of its surface, like the crater here, called Compton. Sometimes, the spacecraft will turn toward space to analyze the lunar atmosphere or recalibrate its instruments, and catch a few glimpses of the Earth. Doing this, NASA explains, is a pretty miraculous feat:
First the spacecraft must be rolled to the side (in this case 67 degrees), then the spacecraft slews with the direction of travel to maximize the width of the lunar horizon in LROC's Narrow Angle Camera image. All this takes place while LRO is traveling faster than 3,580 miles per hour (over 1,600 meters per second) relative to the lunar surface below the spacecraft!
The coast of Liberia is visible at the center of the Earth, and the chunk of land to its right is the Sahara Desert. The image resembles the famous “Blue Marble” shot captured by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, the first photograph taken of the whole round Earth and the only one ever taken by a human being.
(See all Orbital Views here)
This modern marvel is part of the San Alfonso del Mar Resort in Algarrobo, Chile:
The pool is 1,013 m (3,323 ft) long, covering 8 ha (20 acres), containing some 250 million litres (66 million US gallons) of seawater, with a maximum depth of 11.5 ft (3.5 m). The water is pumped from the Pacific Ocean, filtered, and treated. The pool was developed by Fernando Fischmann; his Chilean company Crystal Lagoons built the pool, which opened in December 2006. While early estimates put the total cost of construction at about US$3.5 million for the filtration system alone, more recent estimates are in the area of US$1.5 billion to US$2 billion total for construction and almost US$4 million in annual maintenance.
Head here for a long, laconic video tour accompanied by a sexy saxophone soundtrack.
(See all Orbital Views here)
Three astronauts got a new home address yesterday: The International Space Station, way, way up there.
Yuri Malenchenko of Russia, Tim Kopra of the United States, and Tim Peake of Britain arrived in a Russian Soyuz rocket, photographed by their new roommate as it docked:
(See all Orbital Views here)
At least it is for Kjell Lindgren, the NASA astronaut who spent the past few months photographing bodies of water from above. He returned to Earth on Friday after taking one last photo from the ISS:
We’ll be keeping our eyes out for photos from the newest residents of the orbital station, who arrived there today: Yuri Malenchenko of Russia, Tim Kopra of the United States, and Tim Peake, Britain’s first official astronaut to reach the ISS.
(See all Orbital Views here)
Another profound sight from Daily Overview:
Three years ago, Santa Cruz hosted a conference of the Amazon Network of Socio-Environmental Geo-Referenced Information (RAISG). Money quote:
“If all of the economic interests [projects] that are planned for the upcoming years occur, the Amazon rainforest will become a savanna with spots of forest,” warned the general coordinator of the RAISG, Beto Ricardo, from the Socio-Environmental Institute of Brazil. [...] The deforestation analysis shows that between 2000 and 2010 nearly 240,000 square kilometers (92,000 square miles) of Amazonian forest were deforested. This is equivalent to twice the Ecuadorian Amazon.
(See all Orbital Views here)
This view of the Argentine Rail Yard in Kansas City, Kansas, caught my attention because my dad used to teach middle school just a few miles from it and I would often catch glimpses of it from an overpass:
The rail yard contains 60 classification tracks, 10 receiving tracks, and 10 departure tracks:
As a 780-acre facility, Argentine Yard is the largest freight-car classification facility on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe system and is one of the largest yards of its type in the United States. The BNSF rail line converges at Kansas City, serving as a major hub where freights are transferred between several major railroads making Kansas City the second busiest U.S. rail center. It has a theoretical capacity of 5760 cars per day, but based on 1996 statistics, the yard handled about 2000 cars per day.
Trains arriving at Argentine Yard containing cars that need to be sorted enter the receiving yard. With the use of yard locomotives, the freight cars are pushed up a small hill known as the crest, and then are manually separated for their descent into the track “bowl.” As the cars roll down the crest, computers route them to the correct track based on the car’s destination. Then the groups of cars are removed from the bowl and made into trains on the 10 departure tracks of the yard.
The Argentine got some bad press this summer:
For generations, the rail yard has been the economic lifeblood of the economically challenged Argentine and Turner communities, employing more than 2,000 people. But lately, residents have worried that air pollution from the yard could be damaging their health. For more than a year, they’ve been monitoring the air quality just outside the rail yard, stationing a portable air sampling device on porches and in front yards to collect microscopic particles of diesel exhaust increasingly linked to lung diseases, cancer, heart attacks and premature births. Those residents now say they have strong evidence that the rail yard’s locomotives produce unhealthy levels of pollution — high enough to create risks of death or hospitalization.
(See all Orbital Views here)
The stark blood-red color of the San Francisco Bay salt ponds needs no filter:
Details from the always outstanding Daily Overview:
A recent figure estimates that 80% of the San Francisco Bay wetlands area—approximately 16,500 acres—have been developed for salt mining. The ponds get their particular, vibrant colors from the micro-algae that live there and the species’ tolerance to salinity. Areas that have a bright red hue are caused by the algae Dunaliella, which thrives in water with extremely high salt content.
Amusing Planet has a great collection of more aerial photos of the salt ponds.
(See all Orbital Views here)
Once upon a time, in a distant land called the Daily Dish, bloggers encouraged readers to take photos of the views from their windows.
Kind of like this:
(See all Orbital Views here)
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.
Zelensky has written off the United States.
For more than a year after Donald Trump returned to the White House, Ukraine held out hope—at least publicly—of winning him over. Trump, who revealed his affection for Russia’s Vladimir Putin again and again, largely halted American military aid to Kyiv. He insulted Ukrainian leaders regularly, personally berating President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025. Nevertheless, Ukraine diligently took part in Trump’s peace negotiations, which were tilted to reward Putin’s invasion and turned out to be fruitless. Zelensky agreed to mineral deals that supposedly promised to enrich Americans. He even lavishly praised Trump himself. Despite Ukrainian leaders’ growing doubts, they calculated that speaking sweetly of the American president would do no harm and just might gain his favor.
Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.
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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.
I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows.
On the day I was laid off from the Kennedy Center, I felt a little like Dolley Madison saving the Stuart portrait of Washington before the British sacked the capital. I was the staffer in charge of the artworks in the building. A crucial difference is that my institution, unlike the White House in 1814, had been on fire for months.
About a year elapsed between the moment President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in early 2025 and his declaration this past February that he’d decided to shut down the nation’s cultural center for two years. In between, we had seen artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, firings of old staffers and influxes of new ones—a lot of drama, just not onstage. The date Trump announced for the closure was July 4, the country’s 250th birthday, an event that I had been hired to help commemorate as the institution’s first curator of visual arts and special programming.
The Sorrow and the Pity has lessons for how authoritarianism takes root—and how to fight against it.
The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it “one of the greatest documentaries ever made,” and that remains true. What makes the film so effective is not how it looks at the Germans, a spectral presence, but how it chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed.
The director Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at 97, explores collaboration and resistance through the lens of a small city, Clermont-Ferrand. It’s about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis established a puppet government headed by the World War I hero Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s former protégé Charles de Gaulle fled to Britain, coordinated resistance to the Nazis, and returned to lead a free France. The idea that the French almost uniformly opposed Nazism, with only a few bad apples collaborating, is foundational to France’s postwar identity. The problem, as Ophuls, a Franco-German Jew, demonstrates, is that this is a myth.
Trump has developed a reputation for backing down from his most over-the-top threats, but dismissing his words is a mistake.
Twelve hours after Donald Trump warned that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”—after he’d previously threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages”—the president agreed to a temporary cease-fire. Since then, initial peace negotiations failed and Trump responded with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; a new round of talks may begin soon.
But what to do with his everyone in Iran is going to die comments last week? Because they were designed to pressure Iran to come to the table, and because the promised carnage did not materialize, many observers simply moved on, explaining away Trump’s threats as a ham-fisted negotiation tactic, some kind of 5-D chess, or another example of the president’s propensity to “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out).
Why reactionaries are taking over the world
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Maybe you’ve seen photos of Tehran in the 1970s, just before the Islamic Revolution: images of young women going to work in miniskirts, of couples making out in parks while wearing bell-bottoms, of people at pools in bikinis. It looks like Paris or Milan or Los Angeles. But in 1979 the revolution happened, and now Tehran looks like something from an earlier century.
Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that—going backwards in time. The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.
A shocking number of the president’s supporters have turned against him.
Tomas Montoya has sold festival foods—funnel cakes, burgers, hot dogs—across the American Southwest for years. But lately, business has been rough. Costs are up, so he’s increased his prices. Employees are begging for hours he can’t give them. In Arizona, where he lives, Montoya pays $6 a gallon to fill up his food trucks with diesel. This summer, he may have to skip the California leg of his festival route because fuel is even more expensive there.
“It’s Trump,” Montoya told us outside a popular Hispanic grocery store in Casa Grande, Arizona, much of which sits in one of the most evenly divided House districts in the country. Montoya voted for President Trump in 2024, but now, well, frustrated doesn’t begin to cover how he’s feeling. The president is bragging about the economy, even though everyone Montoya knows is hurting; he promised to stop wars, but started one in Iran. “When Trump opens his mouth, three-quarters of what he says is stories, lies,” Montoya said. He’s planning to vote in the midterm elections this fall. But he may not choose a Republican.
Pastor John Mark Comer has won a massive audience by encouraging his followers to free themselves from the gnawing sense that there is always more to do.
John Mark Comer can be a hard man to find. He’s one of the most famous pastors in America right now, an author whose books have together sold more than 1 million copies, but he’s not the most reachable guy. He has a professional website but no contact page. He rarely travels. And as I reported this story, I began to learn his habits: Sending him a text early in the day was a wash, for instance, because he doesn’t check his phone until after morning prayer time. Once, when I reached out by email, I got an out-of-office response that he had set before Christmas explaining that he was observing “rhythms of rest” and asking that I try him again after his return in mid-January. Incoming messages sent in the meantime would be deleted.
The vice president has decided he’s a more accomplished theologian than Leo XIV.
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to have many rules, but one of them is that once the president picks a fight, his posse must show up to support him, no matter how ill-advised the conflict. And few senior officials are more eager to back up the boss in every embarrassing beef than Vice President Vance, who recently seems to have decided that he, and not Pope Leo XIV, is the true arbiter of Catholic doctrine.
President Trump is personally angry with Leo because the pontiff has been deeply critical of America’s war of choice in Iran. Accordingly, Trump lashed out at His Holiness twice over the past few days. Vance might have seen this as a valuable opportunity to say nothing and let the storm pass; Leo, naturally, doesn’t seem to care all that much what Trump thinks. (As my colleague Liz Bruenig wrote, Leo answers to a higher authority.) Had the vice president remained silent, Trump might have moved on, and Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, would have been able to stay out of a dustup between his president and his spiritual leader.
