New Podcast — Outer Space: We Are All Made of Stars + Endnotes

Our new show and Mel's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week

The Space Shuttle Challenger launching from Kennedy Space Center. [photo: NASA/Unsplash]

Our new episode Outer Space: We Are All Made of Stars is in your podcast player right now! Visit our show notes for awe-inspiring photos and videos, links to our recommended books, and everything else we discuss in the show. (Warning: There may be some feelings in this one.

As you read these words and listen to our podcast, we’re all riding on a ball about 8000 miles (13,000 km) across. Our rotating disco ball in space is dancing around the sun at about 67,000 mph (107,000 km/h).

Our sun is about 93 million miles (150 million km away), shooting us with subatomic particles. Probably not maliciously, but who knows? The sun might be a trickster. It’s also filling our solar system with light so we can see all the other planets, comets, asteroids, dwarf planets, and moons in orbit.

As humans, it’s nearly impossible to not put ourselves at the center of the world — we all have main-character energy. For millions of years, we puny humans have looked up at the sky and tried to understand just what the devil is going on and where we belong in the whole situation.

In this episode, we try to unpack many of the mind-blowing facts we know about space and our expanding universe — and we get real about the emotional impact of embracing our stardust origins. We talk about the condition called the Overview Effect and whether or not space smells funny.

Then we recommend great books that took us there on the page, including:

• a hopepunk story set on an orbiting space fleet

• a thrilling novel about a lady astronaut

• a sci-fi love story set on Mars

• the autobiography of the Milky Way

• a gorgeous book about what aliens can reveal about our humanity

Listen on your favorite podcast app or on our website. We hope you enjoy the show!

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Endnotes: 07 July

The colorful signs above are found on Mambo Beach in Willemstad, the capital of the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. Imagine an endless blue sky over turquoise-blue water lined with candy-colored houses that look like a giant dropped a handful of Lego blocks on his way to the beach. 

Aruba, Bermuda, and the Bahamas get a lot of attention, but Curaçao is less crowded, less expensive, and — dare we say it? — maybe even more dreamy. The Dutch island is in the Caribbean Sea, about 40 miles/64km north of Venezuela. Anytime is a good time to visit: think balmy. The high temperature is in the 80s/low 90s (30sC) throughout the year. You can hike or ride a jet ski (!) to the Blue Room Cave or relax/splash on one of the islands’ 34 soft sand beaches. When you’re hungry, you can indulge in barbecued goat, fried plantains, rice and beans, pumpkin pancakes, and fresh-from-the-sea fish — plus iguana stew for the daring; excellent food video here.

Here are 7 reasons from Lonely Planet and 5 reasons from AFAR that Curaçao should be your next Caribbean vacation. Or settle in for 40 minutes with a full documentary about the island for the scoop on food, diving, kite flying, and more.

— Reading a doorstopper novel or intimidating classic with other people can be a thoroughly rewarding experience. Here’s a handy directory to a slew of slow reads from

Simon Haisell

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— Also handy: A Primer of American Carnival Talk. I’ll meetcha at the grab joint for a hot dog, and we can cut up jackpots.

— A travel writer shares the inside scoop on replacing hotel stays with overnight trains from Amsterdam to Berlin, Zurich, and Budapest — no murders were committed Christie-style. ‘After three nights on sleeper trains, I am ready to quit hotels and planes. Though I was a little sleep- and shower-deprived, the sacrifice was worth it.’

— 9 Luxury Hotels With Epic Animal Encounters. Giraffes, sloths, and gorillas… oh, my.

— Need this:

gettheetothestitchery

A post shared by @gettheetothestitchery

— A short, sharp editorial in The Week about what happens when we lose the library.

— Irresistible headline: Aside from Vampires and Witches, Anne Rice Also Wrote Very Strange Books About Angels.

— Whoopi Goldberg on the books that mean the most to her. (Did you know she wrote a graphic novel about a menopausal superhero? The Change is out on July 10!)

— Oooh, I love this list of obvious travel advice. Exhibit A: ‘Don’t confuse scarcity with value. A really good afternoon in the park (a really good one) is maybe about as good as it gets.’

— This Instagram account is devoted to China’s glorious landscapes as seen through train windows:

travelchinabytrain

A post shared by @travelchinabytrain

— So many exciting food ideas in this list of upcoming cookbook releases from

Nic Miller

. Korean! Greek! Gothic! Scottish! Nigerian! Balkan! Indonesian! Caribbean!

— ‘Really I Just Want to Stay Home and Make Art About My Dog.’ Can 100% relate to this interview with cartoonist Sara Varon, but for me, it’s reading and my cat.

— This is an empowering essay about reading books you don’t entirely understand. ‘At present, I have an alarming number of tabs open… There are 15 pages of notes in my now-finished notebook that are about the same subject that led to all these tabs. A lot of these tabs concern the history of a country I don’t live in. Some are mythology. It’s a real cornucopia of delights, and it’s also very distracting. There are so many rich and fascinating rabbit holes a person might fall down. This is all because I’ve been reading a book that I don’t entirely understand, and frankly, it’s wonderful.’

On Our Strong Sense of Place Blog

Indian Stuffed Peppers with Butter-Curry Sauce Inspired by The Widows of Malabar Hill: What’s better than dinner and a great book? Treat yourself to savory Indian-spiced peppers — and dig into a compelling murder mystery set in 1920s Bombay. In any other time and place, men and women alike would laud our heroine Perveen Mistry for her intelligence, grit, mastery of languages, and analytical mind. But in 1921 Bombay, India, she’s an affront to propriety — until she uses all her gifts to solve the crime.

Let the poem ‘In the Bazaars of Hyderabad’ by Sarojini Naidu transport you to the bustling market of the old city: For more than 200 years, from the 18th to 20th centuries, Hyderabad was called the ‘City of Pearls’ — the place to acquire handmade pearl baubles. It was also the only trading center for Golconda diamonds, mined in the ancient diamond fields of Eastern India and renowned as the finest in the world. This poem by the ‘Nightingale of India’ is a vivid depiction that special time and place.