Convenience Big Store: The 82-year-old who’s off to space

10 July, 2021

Hello,

Here are a few more highlights from this week's issue of The Knowledge, which is now available on the website and the app. If you'd like to have full access and read all our stories, you just need to register here.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

America

Emily Elconin/Getty Images

A crisis of identity

The Fourth of July was once a day of fireworks, street parties and national jubilation, says David Frum in The Atlantic. But listening to Americans talk about their nation's history on Independence Day now is "like an encounter with a depressed person". Reminding the person of how much he or she means to others, "how many admire and even love him or her", only makes things worse. I once lived above a Manhattan psychiatrist, who told me his wealthy clients all arrived with the same complaint: "They thought they were frauds." These days the American Dream is on the couch.

America is having an existential crisis, says Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times. A third of voters think the last presidential election was stolen, and are unswayed by a booming economy that just added 850,000 jobs in a month. The twice-impeached Donald Trump "is near-favourite to clinch the next Republican nomination", even though America's growth rate matches that of "mid-2000s China". The story "isn't that a rich country is so broken, but that a broken country is so rich". Over the Fourth of July weekend, there were more than 500 shootings across the US. Yet America has a higher income per capita than Germany. Money has not bought happiness: "Which democracy would you bet on to be functional by mid-century?"

Yes, America obsesses about identity, says Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph. It always has. My native country is still young: we Americans are descended from people "rarely more than a couple of generations removed" from homelands they have never seen. "They don't know where they belong or who they belong to." So America has periods of "absolute self-lacerating insanity around identity". The reason it's prone to periodic witch hunts – McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the current one over identity politics – is because "people really have lost the sense of home". We get a half-hearted, exported version of America's identity crisis here in Britain. But back home it's "to do with the very nature of the society".

True, but now we're more troubled than ever, says Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. Society rightly put a spotlight on America's "profound legacy of racism" in the wake of George Floyd's murder last May. But a wave of "woke" ideologues want to purge this country of its heart. Nursery children are being taught that America is "at its core an oppressive racist system", designed to enslave and even kill the non-white. The cure, we're taught, is to "confess racism" at every turn and internalise "complicity in evil". Many people "don't really believe in this stuff". But when every important cultural power in America has bought into an ideology deeply hostile to western civilisation, "you can end up in despair".

Quirk of history

Triboulet, a lively court jester in 16th-century France, once slapped King Francis I on the bum. He told the furious monarch: "I'm so sorry, your majesty, I mistook you for the queen." Francis sentenced him to death, but allowed him to choose how he wanted to go. Triboulet replied: "Good sire, I choose to die from old age." The king was so amused that he let him off the hook.

Life

Wally Funk trained to be an astronaut in the 1960s. Getty Images

The 82-year-old who's off to space

On 20 July Jeff Bezos will head into space with three people: his brother, Mark; a mystery bidder who spent $28m on a ticket; and an 82-year-old American woman called Wally Funk. In an Instagram video, the Amazon founder asked Funk how she would feel to leave the planet. She threw her arms around him and squealed: "I would say, 'Honey, that was the best thing that ever happened to me!'"

Funk has been trying to go to space for 60 years, says Sebastian Kettley in The Express. Born Mary Wallace Funk, she was always obsessed with flying. At five she leapt off a barn in a Superman costume and fell into a haystack. At seven she made toy planes with wood. She had her first flying lesson aged nine and got her pilot's licence while she was still a teenager. Her parents didn't care what she did, so long as she was home, washed and wearing a dress every night for dinner.

In 1961, the 22-year-old Funk was accepted by the Woman in Space Program – a Nasa-supported experiment to see if women could handle space. She was the youngest and best volunteer, says Marina Koren in The Atlantic. In one test, candidates floated inside a tank of water in a dark, soundproofed room. Most lasted a few hours before hallucinating. Some male astronauts made it to three. Funk emerged 10 hours 35 minutes later, "not because she was done, but because the doctor administering the test decided it might be time to pull her out".

The Woman in Space Program was cancelled in 1962, and it would be 20 years before an American woman was deemed fit for space travel. But that didn't deter Funk. "Things were cancelled? So what? Wally's going on," she told The Guardian in 2019. She taught flying and travelled the world in a van with her pet poodle and chipmunk. In 2010 she bought a $200,000 ticket for Richard Branson's space mission, Virgin Galactic. She hasn't been able to use that, but she has never given up on her dream: "I will get up there somehow."

Property

THE HIDEAWAY In the hills behind Nice, with views of the Mediterranean, this beautifully restored 17th-century chateau has 11 bedrooms, grand reception rooms and an entrance hall with a sweeping spiral staircase. There's an olive grove in the 170-acre grounds, along with a farmhouse, a caretaker's house and a heated saltwater pool. £5.12m.

Eating in

Pasta chips like mamma never made

The hashtag #Pastachips has racked up nearly 400 million views on TikTok this week. Boiled, tossed in oil and parmesan, then air-fried, it's a snacking craze that has gone viral. Don't have an air-fryer? Food blogger My Nguyen, notoriously criticised by Gordon Ramsay for her carb-free sandwich, advises baking at 220C for eight minutes, tossing, then baking again for another five minutes.

To make a macaroni cheese dip, melt the following ingredients in a pan: two tbsp of butter, 120ml double cream, 360g cheese, salt and garlic powder. Ecco – you've well and truly offended an Italian.

Quoted

"There is something wonderfully characteristic about Roger Federer having two sets of twins. Two pregnancies, four children. He even wins at insemination."

The Telegraph's Madeline Grant, on Twitter