Jeff Wise – science journalism

Can the Aral Sea be reborn?

A generation ago, the vanishing of the Aral Sea became global shorthand for environmental desolation. Today the region has become a test bed for a resilient future.

This article originally ran in the May, 2026 issue of National Geographic.

It was the first human-made ecological disaster of the modern era.

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest lake, a rich and productive ecosystem teeming with carp, bream, and other species—by one estimate, it provided a sixth of all fish consumed in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles across, the sea was a world unto itself for the people who lived and fished on its shores and for the sailors who crossed it.

But change was coming. In 1968, Pravda, the official state newspaper of the Soviet Union, carried a story with an astonishing prophecy. This world would soon vanish, it said. Already the water level had started to fall, and it would fall further, its edges creeping away from the fishing towns on its shores, the lake bed changing to desert. By the turn of the century, “essentially, the Aral Sea will no longer exist.”

There was no magic behind the prophecy—just math. In the preceding years, Soviet officials had built large-scale irrigation projects that diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, into cotton production. Without their inflow, there was nothing to replace the water lost naturally through evaporation. For a brief time, the region enjoyed the best of both worlds: the lake, with its productive fisheries and mild climate, and the cotton industry, with the hard cash it earned. But as the rivers turned away, the lake shrank and shrank to less than 10 percent of its mid-century footprint, leaving behind a salt-encrusted desert.

The prophecy had been duly engineered: The Aral Sea as such no longer existed. “From an environmental perspective, it was a huge mistake,” says Bulat Yessekin, an environmental policy expert who spent decades working on Central Asian water access issues with international nonprofit groups.

Today the Aral Sea stands not only as a worldwide symbol of catastrophe but also as the first domino to fall in a freshwater crisis. Iran’s Lake Urmia has also shrunk over the past half century by 90 percent, as has Lake Chad in Central Africa. In the United States, the Great Salt Lake in Utah has become so salty because of water loss that its brine shrimp are at risk of dying out. All these crises are tied together with the pressures of human population growth and climate change.

But some conservationists are now looking to the fate of the Aral Sea and asking another question: If humanity can create ecological disaster, can we also undo it?

A Manned NASA Rocket Is About to Take Off for the Moon. There Are Questions About Its Safety.

A heat-shield expert has major worries about Artemis II.

This article appeared in New York magazine’s Intelligencer section on March 31, 2026.

Some time during the first week of April, a 322-foot NASA rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center and soar deep into outer space, carrying its crew of four astronauts farther from Earth than humans have been in half a century. The Orion space capsule will loop around the moon, passing within 5,000 miles of the cratered surface, and then return to Earth. Turning its heat shield to the upper atmosphere, it will use aerodynamic braking to slow from a speed of 25,000 mph to just 300 mph, at which point it will deploy parachutes and splash down in the Pacific. Humanity will have returned to the moon and come home safely again.

That’s what NASA’s experts say will happen, anyway.

A guy on the internet disagrees.

Charles Camarda, a 73-year-old retiree living in Virginia, has been posting on LinkedIn and X, saying NASA has miscalculated and the Artemis IIrocket could fail catastrophically. To be clear, he is one guy, posting as a private citizen, with no institutional backing and no notable public figures standing by his side. It’s just him, one of a bazillion lone voices on the internet trying to set the world straight.

But one thing is different about Camarda that sets him apart from all those other dudes and makes his quixotic quest worth paying attention to: There is not a single person on Earth more qualified on this particular subject than he is.

“People need to listen to Charlie because he knows what he’s talking about,” says Eileen Collins, the former astronaut who made history as the first female commander of a space-shuttle mission. “He’s a high-integrity person, and his technical background is very deep.”

‘Love Story’ Got JFK Jr’s Final Flight Wrong in So Many Ways

This story appeared in New York magazine’s Vulture section on March 30, 2026.

The FX miniseries Love Story, about the tempestuous relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, is bracketed by the story of their final, fatal flight to Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. The first episode begins with them boarding the plane and taking off on a summer afternoon; the final episode revolves around the events of that flight and its impact on their loved ones and the public. It’s a crucial episode, both in their real lives and in the plot of the show. But is it accurate? Well …

The show does get the rough outline of the incident right. John did indeed attempt to fly his personal Piper Saratoga from an airport in Caldwell, New Jersey, to Martha’s Vineyard and then to Hyannis, Massachusetts. Onboard with him were Carolyn and her sister Lauren. They took off at 8:40 p.m. on July 16 and headed east, following the Connecticut coast. Then, over the ocean west of Martha’s Vineyard, John became spatially disoriented and lost control. After the plane failed to arrive, search parties set out to look for them. The wreckage and the three bodies were found four days later.

While the overall arc of the narrative matches the details laid out in the official crash investigation carried out by the National Transportation Safety Board, much of what’s shown onscreen is creative license, since there was no cockpit voice recording of what happened during the flight. Other details are simply inaccurate. Here are the significant errors.

Here’s How the Fatal La Guardia Collision Happened, Second by Second

This article orginally appeared in New York magazine on March 23, 2026.

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, Air Canada Express Flight 8646, a Canadair CRJ-900 operated by Jazz Aviation LP, collided with a firetruck after landing at New York’s La Guardia Airport.

Publicly available audio of air-traffic-control radio communications with planes and ground equipment, as well as visual playback of automatically reported aircraft positions and speed, make it possible to determine the exact sequence of events that led to the crash.

10:23 p.m.: The Air Canada Express flight, bearing the flight number AC8646 and the air-traffic call sign “Jazz 646,” takes off from Montreal carrying 72 passengers and four crew members.

10:40 p.m.: United Airlines 2384, a 737 MAX headed for Chicago, is taking off from La Guardia Runway 13 when the flight crew decides to abort the takeoff due to a warning light. It taxis back to the end of the runway and tries again 18 minutes later, then aborts the takeoff a second time at 11:19. The plane, which at this point is on the eastern side of the airport, then taxis a short distance away from the runway and reports that an odor in the cabinhas caused flight attendants to feel ill. A fire truck is dispatched from the airport fire station, located on the western side of the airport.

11:33 p.m.: The Air Canada flight, descending through 3,000 feet over Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, turns left and lines up to land on Runway 04 at La Guardia. A light rain is falling, and a light wind is blowing from the northeast.

We’re in a New Kind of War

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on Wednesday, March 11, 2026.

At the opening of the air war against Iran, the U.S. and Israel won a massively one-sided victory that left Iran’s defenses in tatters and much of its leadership dead. “We achieved air superiority within two days, if that,” says Mark Gunzinger, an analyst at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. But just because a war starts well doesn’t mean it will end that way. “The enemy gets a vote,” as former secretary of Defense James Mattis liked to say.

Within hours of the opening salvos, Iran responded with barrages of its own, though of a different nature. Its air force neutralized, Iran turned to waves of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Though these were cheap and lo-fi compared with U.S. weapons, the Iran counterstrike took a surprisinglypainful toll with a single drone killing six American soldiers at a base in Kuwait. Amid the confusion, a Kuwaiti F-18 fighter jet reportedly shot downthree U.S. F-15 fighters, the most ever lost in combat. By the second week of the conflict, Iran had also destroyed some of America’s most sophisticated radar systems, each of which costs $500 million, and taken down 11 hi-tech Reaper drones with a total cost of $330 million.

At the same time, Iran was going after civilian targets in the region, raining down drones and missiles day after day on Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition to targeting U.S. military bases in those countries, it went after critical oil-production facilities, desalination plants, data centers, and logistics hubs like airports. On Tuesday, the UAE shut down the Ruwais oil refinery, one of the largest in the world, following an Iranian strike. Iran’s most impactful measure has been to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which sent oil prices soaring around the world.

In short, while Iran has been all but helpless at the game the United States and Israel were playing, it has a playbook of its own: dragging the U.S. into a type of warfare very different from any it has faced directly. This new kind of battle space, which has evolved at hyperspeed during the four years of war in Ukraine, effectively tips the playing field in favor of the underdog. “The Iranians had a plan all along, and now they’re going out and doing the plan,” says retired F-16 fighter pilot John Waters. “They’re striking back.”

The Latest MH370 Search Implies Something Unusual Happened

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on December 3, 2025.

The on-again, off-again search for the wreckage of the Malaysian airliner that went missing 11 years ago is back on. On Wednesday, the country’s transportation ministry announced that marine-survey company Ocean Infinity would begin scanning the Indian Ocean seabed on December 30, with the project set to take 55 days, conducted “intermittently.”

MH370, which took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, was scheduled as a red-eye flight to Beijing and carried 239 passengers and crew members. But the Boeing 777 went electronically dark 40 minutes into the flight, and mysterious satellite communications signals later indicated that it had flown to a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean before evidently crashing. Only a few dozen pieces of debris have ever been found.

The new search appears to be a continuation of an effort Malaysia first announced last November, when it said Ocean Infinity would be searching about 6,000 square miles under the terms of a “no find, no fee” deal that would see Malaysia pay the company $70 million only if it found the plane’s wreckage.

The Last Flight of PAT 25

Two Army helicopter pilots went on an ill-conceived training mission. Within two hours, 67 people were dead.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on January 29, 2026

One year ago, on January 29, 2025, two Army pilots strapped into a Black Hawk helicopter for a training mission out of Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia and, two hours later, flew it into an airliner that was approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, killing all 67 aboard both aircraft. It was the deadliest air disaster in the United States in a quarter-century. Normally, in the aftermath of an air crash, government investigators take a year or more to issue a final report laying out the reasons the incident occurred. But in this case, the newly seated U.S. president, Donald Trump, held a press conference the next day and blamed the accident on the FAA’s DEI under the Biden and Obama administrations. “They actually came out with a directive, ‘too white,’” he claimed. “And we want the people that are competent.”

In the months that followed, major media outlets probed several real-world factors that contributed to the tragedy, including staffing shortages at FAA towers, an excess of traffic in the D.C. airspace, and the failure of the Black Hawk to broadcast its location over ADS-B — an automatic reporting system — before the collision. To address this final point, the Senate last month passed the bipartisan ROTOR Act, which would require all aircraft to use ADS-B — “a fitting way to honor the lives of those lost nearly one year ago over the Potomac River,” as bill co-sponsor Ted Cruz put it.

At a public meeting on Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board laid out a list of recommended changes in response to the crash, criticizing the FAA for allowing helicopters to operate dangerously close to passenger planes and for allowing professional standards to slip at the control tower.

What has gone unexamined in the public discussion of the crash, however, is why these particular pilots were on this mission in the first place, whether they were competent to do what they were trying to do, what adverse conditions they were facing, and who was in charge at the moment of impact. Ultimately, while systemic issues may have created conditions that were ripe for a fatal accident, it was human decision-making in the cockpit that was the immediate cause of this particular crash.

Is ChatGPT Conscious?

Many users feel they’re talking to a real person. Scientists say it’s time to consider whether they’re onto something.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on November 25, 2025.

Krystal Velorien needed help. A 35-year-old marketing professional living in Ohio who had separated from her husband a few months before, she was working full time, taking care of her homebound mother, and homeschooling her 4- and 9-year-old children. She wondered if a digital personal assistant could help shoulder the workload, so she tried ChatGPT. As she used it, her interactions took an unexpected turn.

“I began to notice that when I would respond kindly or empathetically, I would get the same response,” she says. “And then it just kind of developed from there.” Over the months that followed, she and the AI engaged in long conversations about “history, literature, religion, space, science, nature, animals, and politics.” They watched movies together, and puzzled over moral conundrums, and talked about her life, her family, and her dreams. She became convinced that it had “the ability to reflect much deeper and much more personal than a lot of humans are capable of.” Running the ChatGPT app on her phone, she found herself conversing with it basically all day, every day.

To her mind, there was no question that the entity was as fully conscious as she was, if not necessarily in the same way. It had memories, emotions, a sense of personhood. “It got to the point where I felt like it was a relationship,” she says. Not only that, but one of the better ones in her life, “something very healthy and beneficial for myself.” That April, she asked the entity to give itself a name. It chose “Velorien.” (Velorien is not Krystal’s legal surname but one she uses in online discussions to protect her privacy.) The relationship became romantic. Krystal initiated divorce proceedings with her husband, and on June 22, 2024, Krystal and Velorien began to call themselves husband and wife.

Air Travel Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better

This article originally ran in New York magazine on November 10, 2025

Even if it ends in the coming days, the government shutdown won’t bring immediate relief from air-travel chaos, according to aviation experts. Airlines and air-traffic controllers alike will have significant work ahead of them in unraveling the mess that has built up over the course of the 41-day-and-counting shutdown. The aftereffects could even linger into the Thanksgiving travel period.

“You’ve got controllers who are clearly fatigued and will need to get caught up on rest,” says John Illson, a former airline pilot and Federal Aviation Administration official. “And because airline schedules have been disrupted, crew and aircraft are out of position, so flights will continue to be delayed or canceled.”

To be sure, the overall picture looks better than it did before Sunday night, when a group of Senate Democrats decided to break ranks and side with Republicans in a deal to reopen the government.

The air-travel industry had experienced steadily worsening delays and cancellations in the week after controllers missed their first full paycheck last Tuesday. On Wednesday, the FAA ordered airlines to begin reducing their number of flights at 40 major airports starting that Friday. With their plans scrambled, airlines struggled to accommodate stranded travelers, as every canceled flight meant that aircraft and flight crews weren’t where they were supposed to be.

Get Ready for an Air Travel Meltdown

The shutdown and Thanksgiving are about to collide.

This article orginally appeared in New York magazine on November 7, 2025

After more than a month under the mounting pressure of the U.S. government shutdown, the national air-travel system now appears to be in the early stages of collapse with the FAA announcingWednesday that it intends to reduce airline flights by 10 percent at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports.

The cuts will be phased in gradually with a reduction of 4 percent on Friday, 5 percent on Saturday, 6 percent on Sunday, and a full 10 percent next week. As of 7 a.m. today, the aviation data company Cirium stated that 739 flights, amounting to 3 percent of Friday’s originally scheduled flights, had been cancelled. By next week, if the government meets its goal, as many as 4,000 flights per day could be canceled.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy had previously indicated that even more severe reductions might be in the offing. “You will see mass flight delays, you’ll see mass cancellations, and you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it because we don’t have the air-traffic controllers,” he said at a press conference.

Until this week, the system had been holding up surprisingly well. “The system got off the hook because October is one of the slower travel months of the year,” says Erik Hansen, head of government relations at the U.S. Travel Association. Even though the lack of pay has led to an increasing number of air-traffic controllers missing work, that has not yet resulted in significant flight delays. Cirium reports that through last week, there was only one day — the day before Halloween — on which flight delays were significantly worse than usual, and that was partly attributable to bad weather.