Savannah Mandel, 23, is at the vanguard of researchers looking at the human relations side of leaving Earth.

In the sci-fi novel 2312, set on Mercury, citizens called sunwalkers risk being blinded or killed by the scorching sun, yet they follow it anyway, trudging west. They stay slightly ahead of the dawn, carefully glimpsing the sun they worship when they can, for seeing it is like “seeing the face of God.”

Outer space anthropologist Savannah Mandel found resonance between author Kim Stanley Robinson’s sunwalkers and the scientists, civilians and military who work at Spaceport America, the United States’ new “airport” for commercial spacecraft, located in the New Mexico desert. She spent 10 weeks there doing fieldwork for her dissertation and found its workers “willing to risk everything” to participate in outer space ventures.

Not only are football and basketball programs not graduating Black players, but there’s no plan to fix this epidemic.

A law signed last month in California allowing college athletes to earn endorsement deals has opened up a fresh debate over how to compensate the players who power an $8 billion industry. The centerpiece of their current recompense is a college scholarship — an increasingly pricey ticket to higher learning and higher lifetime wages. But it’s not worth much without a diploma.

Less than 2 percent of athletes in the NCAA go on to play professional sports, and those chances are more than six times higher for college baseball than for football or basketball. And for those who don’t go on to a pro career, other options can be limited: Across the five major Division 1 conferences, 45 percent of Black male athletes fail to graduate within six years.

Halloween industries are undergoing a tectonic change in terror: haunted houses that aren't really there.