march 1982

Astronauts are more than cosmic travelers. They’re also research subjects in the careful study of what exactly outer space does to the human body. On the ground, researchers measure vitals, draw blood, swab cheeks, and more. In orbit around the Earth, the astronauts do the work themselves.

That’s how they found the blood clot.

An astronaut was carrying out an ultrasound on their own body as part of a new study, guided in real time by a specialist on the ground. A similar test before the astronaut launched to space had come back normal. But now the scan showed a clump of blood.

“We were not expecting this,” says Karina Marshall-Goebel, a senior scientist at NASA and the author of the study, published earlier this month. “This has never been reported before.”

His eyes fall to the floor when I ask him to describe it. We’ve been tiptoeing toward it for 45 minutes, and so far, every time he seems close, he backs away, or leads us in a new direction. There are competing theories in the press, but Joe Biden has kept mum on the subject. I want to hear him explain it. I ask him to walk me through the night he appeared to lose control of his words onstage.

“I—um—I don’t remember,” Biden says. His voice has that familiar shake, the creak and the croak. “I’d have to see it. I-I-I don’t remember.”

We’re in Biden’s mostly vacant Washington, D.C., campaign office on an overcast Tuesday at the end of the summer. Since entering the Democratic presidential-primary race in April, Biden has largely avoided in-depth interviews. When I first reached out, in late June, his press person was polite but noncommittal: Was an interview really necessary for the story?

Through four long days of impeachment hearings, witness after witness had sat passively by as Republican lawmakers responded to their detailed testimony by arguing that President Donald Trump had a legitimate reason to be suspicious of Ukraine, because he believed that the country “tried to take me down” in 2016.

That silence from the witness table ended this morning, as Fiona Hill used her opening statement before the House Intelligence Committee to accuse Republicans on the panel of peddling a “false narrative” that amounted to Russian propaganda.

“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill, the former top expert for Ukraine and Russia on the National Security Council, told the lawmakers. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

Listening to the radio on her drive home from work back in January, 48-year-old Brooke Clagett caught the tail end of an interview with a man she couldn’t identify. “I was just stunned by how, on every subject that he discussed, he sounded reasonable and thoughtful,” Clagett told me last night. She pulled up in front of her house, but she didn’t go inside: “It was one of those classic driveway moments where you stay in the car to get to the end of the interview to find out who the hell it was.”

The man turned out to be Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Fans I’ve spoken with have sometimes talked about their first time hearing Buttigieg in the same way someone might describe a religious experience. But Buttigieg’s success in the presidential primary has, in some ways, been miraculous: A little-known Midwest mayor who decided less than a year ago to run for president is now leading polls in the first two voting states. And yesterday, Clagett, who first heard his voice 10 months ago, was the happy host of a crowded pro-Buttigieg debate-watch party at Hank’s Oyster Bar in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack.

One of them was retracted by its publisher, CNN—a form of corporate responsibility never seen from a White House notorious for emitting six false statements in a single morning. Another was an opinion piece in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that did not claim to report news, but instead built known facts into a damning narrative of Donald Trump’s Russia connection. The other four range from the exaggerated to the unverified to the apparently mistaken.

But let’s take a closer look at those errors and what they mean. One of the stories singled out by Nunes was published by BuzzFeed News. That story asserted that Trump had explicitly directed his then–personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project. Cohen would ultimately testify to Congress that Trump’s direction was implicit, not explicit.