During the Cold War, Soviet propagandists were always eager for evidence that capitalism was cruel, unstable, morally bankrupt and ultimately dehumanizing. So, when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath appeared—first as a novel, then as a Hollywood film—it seemed like a perfect gift.

Here was America, they thought, exposed: poor farmers, suffering families, wage exploitation, hard lives. The Soviets approved screenings of the film, confident it would confirm everything they had been telling their citizens about life under capitalism.

It didn’t work out that way. What they got instead was confusion.  As in the case of “the Emperor’s New Clothes” there can be a problem with showing reality for anyone who is honest enough to look at it.

Soviet audiences watched The Grapes of Wrath carefully—and noticed things the propagandists hadn’t.

Engrossed in the divisive politics and outrage industrial complex of our era, many people ignored one of the most interesting spectacles of the year: a parade of six planets on display in the heavens. During the last great planetary alignment of the year, lucky viewers in the northern hemisphere could see Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in the pre-dawn hours of August 10.

Budding astronomers and night sky admirers foiled by a cloudy day or a snoozed alarm can take heart – this phenomenon is not nearly so rare as the transit of Venus or the return of Halley’s Comet. Our familiar fellow inhabitants of the solar system continue their solitary journeys orbiting the sun, eventually aligning again – from Earth’s perspective – in 2026.