Four people went to the moon and I got sofa time with my boy 🌙 Plus Reed Hastings exits

Issue 86 — Saturday, April 18, 2026

Blackout.

You’re being crushed. Falling at 24,664 miles per hour, your body is being yanked the equivalent of Manhattan-to-Harlem, every second.

Outside the window, no air, just orange and white plasma ripping itself apart. Three times your bodyweight presses your spine into a seat, bolted to a hull shielding five thousand degrees of heat.

The camera comes wide. A flying dot pricks the sky. Crash zoom. The capsule’s intact. Relief. It descends and slows, descends and slows, descends and slows.

Radio crackles back.

It’s 1 a.m. I’m watching the Artemis II splashdown live with my thirteen-year-old. His legs are curled over my lap, a foot up behind my ear, we’re perpendicular so he’s got the whole length of the sofa and has been watching his phone for the last eight minutes.

The staying-up “vegas-baby-vegas” energy has slipped from Vince Vaughn to Jon Favreau.

But for this moment, we both sit up.

Three parachutes bloom, magnificent, one hundred and sixteen feet across, red and white stripes against Pacific blue seas. Air fills them like three giant Tunnock’s Tea Cakes.

This is the furthest humans have been from Earth in fifty-three years and it looks like a space mission from the seventies. The capsule is the same, the parachutes are the same, and the ocean is still there.

Is this live? I mean it really looks like we’re watching old footage.

It’s real. This is Artemis II, and if there was an Artemis I, then I missed it altogether.

Nine days ago, none of this existed. I was doomscrolling China tariffs, Theroux clips of HS Tikky Toky and updates on a war in Iran.

Then a headline: Four people are headed to the moon. Huh. Wow?

An open YouTube tab, a live link. I clicked.

And I stayed.

If Apollo wives pressed their ears to squawk boxes to hear everything, then I lay in bed, AirPods in, and did exactly the same.

For nine nights I listened like I was there. CapCom and Integrity, just two voices. Just tiny updates. Just very very long silences.

Battery rotations, T-shirts slung over windows, helium system redundancies, camera cleaning. And, yes, waste management clocked up quite a few mentions.

Are we go for fecal? They were go for fecal.

The more I listened, the deeper I fell, losing more and more of the night. By twilight, I’m scribbling down words on a pad by the bed.

We can see the Moon out of the docking hatch right now. It’s a beautiful sight.

Copy Moon-joy.

Wow, indeed.

It’s only when the crew settles the cabin into pre-sleep configuration that I’m able to drift off myself.

Liz Plank saw us first: “If you have spent the last week inexplicably emotional about a space mission, you are not alone, and you are not being dramatic.”

She reached for the words John Rogers had already given us: competency porn.

We need it.

My last working memory of space is Jeff Bezos boarding a rocket shaped like a penis, emerging wearing a cowboy hat and then putting Katy Perry, Gayle King, and his own fiancée on it like some kind of sub-orbital hen do.

We’re now following four terrifyingly qualified humans piloting the most extraordinary machine we’ve ever made.

And, frankly, it’s a relief.

Not least for my feed. For one strange week, it turns its back on noise and shows me excellence, awe, and memes about life in a multi-billion dollar rollerskate:

A cramped cabin crew working a trajectory change, and a jar of Nutella floats into fame. A translunar injection burn executed whilst an inflatable green alien waves them on.

Down here, a creator turns the phone on herself, trying to mouth oh my God without crying. Up there, a spoof 90s sitcom intro, astronauts as the ensemble cast, shoulder shrugs, side glances, and aw-shucks, you got me smiles to camera.

Now, on live TV, everything’s coming full circle.

I’m looking through a tesseract.

I see Stewart Brand, high on LSD on a San Francisco rooftop in 1966, staring at the skyline and wondering why we’d never been shown a photograph of the whole Earth. Six years later, the shutter is clicking, and now every kid on every sofa tonight, including mine, knows what the Blue Marble looks like.

Christina Koch. After nine nights of listening, I feel like I know her. She holds the longest single spaceflight by a woman — three hundred and twenty-eight days — and is Mission Specialist 1 of NASA’s Artemis II.

She notices something else:

The blackness.

Not night or darkness, or even space. But the void. The hard edge between Earth and nothing.

It lets us know. The light is here. And only here.

We’ll choose it every time.

Back in the room, it’s time to welcome them home.

The live broadcast ends. I get up, my son rolls back onto his front and back onto his phone.

I head to the basement fridge and grab two cans — a Diet Sprite and a Diet Fanta. He chooses which. It’s way past bedtime, but the drink buys me a few more minutes.

I ask if he’d like to go to space one day. Ugh, sure, he says.

Copy that. The brush-off smarts. But nine days of competency porn removes my urge to snap back.

He takes the stairs two at a time. I stand at the bottom to watch him soar all the way up and disappear. He doesn’t look back. A door clanks shut.

I stare at the empty stairs, stairs I carried him up yesterday, in a car seat.

It’s the silence that smarts now. Not the brush-off. Not even that he didn’t say goodnight. Or that he hasn’t, for a while, actually.

To stay in the light, I do the maths. Four people went all the way to the moon and it got me a couple of hours on the sofa with my boy.

Copy Moon-joy.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

Oil prices fall and stocks rise as Iran reopens Strait of Hormuz | Fast Company

Are mega-layoffs becoming the new normal for big business? | The Wall Street Journal

UK economy grew faster than expected in February | BBC

Brand Beat

Nutella’s viral Artemis moment is the stuff of marketers’ dreams | The Wall Street Journal

Coca-Cola revives the Hilltop ad for America’s 250th | Ad Age

How brands pitch America250 without starting a culture war | Fast Company

Allbirds stock surges 580% after dramatic pivot from shoes to AI | BBC

Why Allbirds lost while Crocs and On are winning the shoe wars | Inc

PepsiCo beats earnings as Doritos and Lay’s price cuts lure shoppers back | CNBC

Is this how the ad industry dies? | The Spectator

Duolingo’s taxi-driver test for senior hires | The Times

Brand builders are back — and marketers are paying attention | Digiday

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings steps down | The Guardian

Patagonia names its first-ever marketing and impact director | Marketing Week

Lululemon’s CEO search drags on as Q4 pressure mounts | Women’s Wear Daily

Skechers is back with more AI ad slop | Creative Bloq

Coachella’s brand-trip chaos exposes how fragile creator deals really are | Ad Age

Your board game group has a sponsor — and a brand strategy | The Wall Street Journal

Goop Kitchen’s New York campaign is a love letter to the city | Adweek

Megan Fox fronts Dr. Squatch’s first big deodorant campaign | Marketing Dive

Asian foods brand Clearspring launches biggest ad campaign yet | The Grocer

Creator TV could be the next era of television | Marketing Brew

Podcast listeners feel left out as video takes over | The Wall Street Journal

Starting Up

UK’s £500m sovereign AI unit signs deals with seven startups | Sifted

ElevenLabs, Synthesia and Luminance lead the UK’s AI scale-up surge | Maddyness

Berry-picking robot startup raises £3m for farm trials | UKTech News

Nurture Brands sells juice factory to The Juice Smith | The Grocer

Tech Tidbits

Unmasking Satoshi: the quest to find Bitcoin’s elusive creator | The New York Times

This EEG beanie claims it can read your thoughts | Wired

Is AI tokenmaxxing leading us nowhere? | TechCrunch

Claude Opus 4.7 is more honest and less sycophantic, Anthropic claims | Mashable

Reese Witherspoon calls using AI a feminist act | Fast Company

Venture Vibes

$15 billion bid to acquire Jack Daniel’s maker | The New York Times

British investor builds $500m stake in TikTok’s parent | Financial Times

Amazon bets $11.57bn on space internet to rival Starlink | Forbes

Tiger Global backs PopUp Bagels at a $300m valuation | Bloomberg

Design Driven

Walmart gives Great Value a modern redesign | Retail Dive

Anthropic launches AI design tool for slides and prototypes | Quartz

Unseen Lennon and Ono footage appears in new ‘Love’ video | Rolling Stone

Happiness

How to stay ambitious without burning yourself out | Harvard Business Review

Your suffering is a compass — here’s how to read it | Big Think

Why the Artemis II crew is the ultimate display of competency porn | Liz Plank

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