To Boldly Go Into the Unknown
A history of risking it all in service of exploration — out now in The New York Sun
“Risk is not made equally.
Some risk is flippant and comic — $10 on a racehorse or on two tech billionaires having a cage fight. Other risks are repulsively reckless. To hear stories of families left destitute by a husband’s gambling addiction is heartbreaking but also maddening.
And there’s the kind of risk that matters most: exploration. Astronauts at the edge of physics. Mountaineers beyond the end maps. Divers looking into the black abyss where no person had gone before.”
Out now in The New York Sun: my piece on the history of explorers who lost it all searching for the unknown. Read it here!