Tom Hanks Reads His Tale of Going to the Moon

episode

The New Yorker Radio Hour not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from The New Yorker Radio Hour

Grandmaster Flash on “Birth of a Culture” 35 min · 22 Sep 2026

Malcolm Gladwell on “The American Way of Killing” 25 min · 18 Sep 2026

From In the Dark: The Journey 56 min · 16 Sep 2026

John Wilson and “The History of Concrete” 20 min · 15 Sep 2026

Colin Kaepernick, Ten Years After Taking a Knee 50 min · 11 Sep 2026

Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Americans in a Time of Peril 25 min · 08 Sep 2026

All episodes from The New Yorker Radio Hour →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded18 Jul 2019

Publisherfeeds.feedburner.com ↗

Handlerec:2018463

Show notes

In 2014, Tom Hanks—the star of “Apollo 13,” among many other accomplishments—wrote a short story about going to the moon. But his was not a dramatic story of NASA heroes facing grave danger. Hanks told the tale of a very twenty-first century mission, executed D.I.Y. style, with four misfits in a space capsule run off an iPad and held together with duct tape. The story, “Alan Bean Plus Four,” was published in The New Yorker in 2014. Hanks originally read the story for the New Yorker’s Writer’s Voice podcast.

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Sign in