175. Life-changing

I.

The astronauts who flew to the moon and back this past April were in the Netherlands this week. I was invited by ESA to come along. During a whirlwind visit, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen talked about their unique journey and the contribution Europe had made.

For such a special visit, it was remarkably quiet in Noordwijk. There were a few people from the media and hardly anyone else. ESA had organised a general press moment and then paired journalists up with interview candidates. Each journalist got at least one astronaut.

I sat with Victor Glover, the pilot of Artemis II, for a little under ten minutes. He was at ease. His wife sat patiently waiting nearby. Glover wore his blue uniform and looked like a superstar without acting like one.

He told me about the moment he realised he was very far from home. That moment came pretty quickly. “We started to tilt and rose above Earth’s atmosphere,” Glover said. “You see the blue sky beneath you disappear and black space appears. You’re enveloped in darkness and the moon looms ahead. I thought: oh wow, that’s where we’re headed. And at that point we weren’t even that far from Earth yet.”

Glover did a great job explaining why astronauts often come back from space as changed people. I’ve put the audio clip below so you can listen to it. It’s about the overview effect — the realisation of just how fragile Earth is when you’re hovering above it.

“You see the Earth as it was made,” Glover said. “Without maps, legends, borders and place names. You see it as a whole. In fact, Earth looks more like a human cell or a plant cell: a living system in which everything cooperates, moves and breathes. Where water, air and nutrients are constantly in motion.”

When you’re that far out in the universe, looking back at that little blue marble in the distance, you can’t imagine why wars and polarisation exist. “Earth is our spaceship, and together we’re the crew,” Glover told me. “If more people realised that, it would be harder to throw a rock — a piece of the spaceship — at someone else. Do you see what I mean? I think we’d treat each other better.”

Glover thinks seeing Earth from such a great distance wouldn’t leave anyone unmoved. “But I think we’d be moved far more deeply still if we could see how much emptiness it’s surrounded by.”

II.

As a teenager I watched a ridiculous amount of Jackass on MTV. I also saw all the spinoffs, like Wildboyz and Viva La Bam. The shows revolved around a deranged group of friends pulling off the most idiotic stunts. “We put stupidity under a magnifying glass,” director Jeff Tremaine recently said about the Jackass franchise, which is coming to an end after 26 years with a new film.

In Jackass: Best and Last, the crew reunites one last time to turn everything upside down. Almost all of them are there: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Danger Ehren and Wee Man. Their friend Ryan Dunn has long since passed away, but he’s still missed. His friends keep making a point of that.

There’s also footage of Bam Margera, who was fired during the previous film and declined to return this time. The reason Margera still appears is that Jackass: Best and Last contains a lot of archival footage — clips I’ve seen a hundred times before, but also videos that have never aired.

A few very early stunts starring Johnny Knoxville stand out. In one, he shoots himself in the chest with a gun while wearing a bulletproof vest padded with some skin magazines underneath. In another sketch, he walks into a hardware store in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit, asking for a saw. The police show up, and MTV suspended Jackass before it had even properly aired.

You could argue endlessly about who’s actually the craziest of the bunch. You’d think Steve-O, since he pulls the grossest stunts. In the new footage shot for this film, he shoots a ping-pong ball out of his ass and undergoes a ‘prostate exam’ performed by the newest cast member: a humanoid robot. But don’t count out Knoxville. He might look like the most stable one of the group, but he took the most risks. The footage of him getting launched into the air by bulls is not for the faint of heart.

The new scenes don’t hold a candle to the old stunts, but I still found myself laughing out loud, wincing, at all the gory and painful things these guys put themselves through again. The funniest moments for me are always the ones between takes, when cast members think they’re safe and get sucker-punched in the balls out of nowhere. What can I say? That dumb teenage humour never really leaves you.

Mixing old footage with new gives this film a melancholic edge. The passage of time doesn’t spare even this group. And they were supposed to stay young forever.

PS.

Tom Cruise and director Alejandro González Iñárritu are releasing Digger later this year. In the film, Cruise plays a rather eccentric oil tycoon who has to save the world. It’s Tom Cruise exactly how I like him: batshit crazy.

New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill discovered that a biography about her life was being sold on Amazon. She writes: “The hardcover cost $26.99, which seemed a bit steep, but my editor splurged on a copy and I was forced to read it. (…) The book is flattering, fabricated and absolutely packed with em dashes. It bears all the signs of A.I. slop.”

The smear frame is used in cartoons to emphasise fast movement without making the image unclear. Lots of people thought the first smear frame came from The Dover Boys at Pimento University, a film from 1942. But Zane Little found much older examples. Lovely (super short) video.

Bob Dylan is coming back to Europe and the UK later this year. The Netherlands isn’t among the tour dates. Since I jump at every chance to still see Bob (85 years old, still going strong), I’m now debating a night in Antwerp or Düsseldorf.

For anyone who thinks everything used to be better: here’s The Loading Museum. You can, for instance, wait twelve seconds while a photo loads.

You just read blog №175, written in the week of 13 to 19 July 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it in your inbox every Sunday, free of charge.