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Bezos in space: He’s stepping down as Amazon chief executive early next month. What next? Well, as Jeff Bezos announced this morning, he and his brother Mike will be among the inaugural crew of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft. “Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space,” Bezos wrote on Instagram. The space-travel company’s suborbital hop is scheduled for July 20 from West Texas, the Wall Street Journal reports.
What if there’s no herd immunity? Public health officials have reassuring news. Even if only 50 percent to 70 percent of Americans have gotten the highly effective vaccines against COVID-19, there will be a gradient of reduced exposure and transmission of the pandemic, Nat Geo’s Amy McKeever finds. That means the higher the vaccination rate for your community or state, the lower the chance of exposure. The virus has killed nearly 600,000 Americans.
Love for American Girls endures: The original American Girls dolls are for sale again, to celebrate the brand’s 35th anniversary, and fans couldn’t be happier. It’s been more than a decade since the company “archived” some of the historical figures but the social media reaction to their revival demonstrates just how much they influenced young girls, Smithsonian reports.
When Tulsa is personal: Nat Geo’s Tucker C. Toole remembers his grandfather taking him aside years ago to tell him he had an ancestor who was wealthy on Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” before whites destroyed his properties and killed hundreds of Blacks. Only when reporting on the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre did Tucker fully understand. Toole’s great-great-great grandfather, J.B. Stradford, escaped lynching, but never returned to Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, Toole writes. See the trailer from Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer, the documentary film premiering June 18 on the National Geographic Channel. And see related stories on our Race in America page.
Related: Catch the next Nat Geo Virtual Field Trip: Revisiting History on Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET. Explorer Tara Roberts explores sunken slave ships and DeNeen L. Brown reveals missing details from the Tulsa Massacre. Register here.
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