October 11: The Walk, the Show, the Song Three October 11ths defined by firsts that changed what we thought was possible — in space, on late-night television, and in the language of peace Some firsts announce themselves loudly, arriving with ceremony and fanfare. Others slip into the world more quietly — a woman stepping through an airlock into the void, a roomful of unknown comedians going live on a Saturday night, a piano ballad released into a world that didn't yet know it needed those particular words. October 11 holds all three kinds. In 1984, an astronaut from Patterson, New Jersey floated outside a spacecraft and proved, in the most literal sense possible, that there was no ceiling left. In 1975, a television producer bet that American audiences wanted to laugh at things that mattered. And in 1971, a former Beatle sat down at a piano and wrote something that has outlasted every era it has passed through. Extravehicular   On October 11, 1984, Kathryn Sullivan floated out of the airlock of the Space Shuttle Challenger and into open space, becoming the first American woman — and the first woman from any nation — to conduct a spacewalk. The extravehicular activity lasted three and a half hours, during which Sullivan and fellow astronaut David Leestma demonstrated the feasibility of an orbital refueling system, testing equipment and procedures that would be essential to the long-term maintenance of satellites in orbit. Sullivan moved through the work with the methodical precision her training demanded, tethered to the shuttle and exposed to the full environment of low Earth orbit — the silence, the temperature extremes, the unfiltered view of a planet curving away beneath her. It was, by any measure, one of the more extraordinary offices in the history of human employment. Sullivan had come to NASA through a path that reflected her particular combination of ambitions. She had earned a doctorate in geology, spoken multiple languages, and served as an oceanographic researcher before being selected in the astronaut class of 1978 — the same class that included Sally Ride, who had become the first American woman in space the previous year. The two milestones together — first in space, first in spacewalk — completed a sequence that had begun with the integration of women into the astronaut corps only six years earlier. Sullivan went on to fly two more shuttle missions, serve as chief scientist at NOAA, and become the first woman to dive to the deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep, in 2020. The spacewalk was not the ceiling of her career. It was one rung of a very long ladder.   The view from low Earth orbit — the environment Kathryn Sullivan entered on October 11, 1984, becoming the first woman to walk in space. Live from New York On October 11, 1975, at 11:30 p.m. Eastern time, NBC aired the first episode of Saturday Night Live — ninety minutes of live sketch comedy, political satire, and musical performance that introduced America to a cast of largely unknown performers billed as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. George Carlin hosted. Billy Preston and Janis Ian provided the music. Andy Kaufman performed his Mighty Mouse lip-sync routine. The show that producer Lorne Michaels had conceived as an alternative to the safe, pre-recorded entertainment that dominated late-night television landed on the air rough, ambitious, and unmistakably alive in a way that television comedy had rarely managed before. NBC executives were reportedly uncertain about what they had put on the air. The audience, smaller at first than it would eventually become, recognized something new. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players — Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner — would not remain unknown for long. Within two seasons, Saturday Night Live had become a cultural institution, its catchphrases entering the national vocabulary and its weekly cold opens shaping the way Americans processed politics, celebrity, and the week's events. Fifty years on, the show has launched more careers and absorbed more American cultural history than any other program on television. It has been uneven, occasionally brilliant, sometimes irrelevant, and persistently itself — live, late, and willing to fail in public in ways that recorded television cannot risk. The formula Michaels built in 1975 has proven, against all reasonable expectations, to be essentially indestructible. Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where Saturday Night Live went live for the first time on October 11, 1975 — and has returned every week since. ❦ Imagine   On October 11, 1971, John Lennon released "Imagine" as a single in the United States, introducing to radio audiences a song he had written and recorded at his estate at Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, England. The song arrived just over a year after the Beatles had formally dissolved, and it carried the philosophical ambitions that Lennon had been developing through his peace activism and his collaboration with Yoko Ono — a vision of a world without the divisions of religion, nationality, and private property that he believed caused most human conflict. The melody was simple enough to be hummed by anyone who heard it once. The lyrics asked something more difficult: to imagine, seriously and without irony, a world organized around human solidarity rather than the categories that separate people from one another. The song reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 on its initial release and number one in the United Kingdom. After Lennon's murder in December 1980, it returned to the charts and has remained in continuous cultural circulation ever since — performed at Olympic ceremonies, at memorial services, at political rallies across the ideological spectrum, and at virtually every moment of collective grief or aspiration that has required music equal to the occasion. It has been criticized as naive, celebrated as visionary, and covered by artists in virtually every genre and language. Lennon himself, asked about the song's politics, described it as "anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic" — but said he had wrapped those ideas in enough sugar to make them palatable. More than fifty years later, the medicine is still going down, and the world is still being invited to imagine.   Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, where John Lennon wrote and recorded "Imagine" — a song that has outlasted every era it has passed through.

The Key at the Top of the Internet Today, the key that anchors the security of the internet's address book is replaced for only the second time in history. Today, Sunday, October 11, one of the most important and least noticed switches on the internet takes effect. The Domain Name System, the global address book that turns names like a website's web address into the numbers computers use, begins relying on a new cryptographic key at its very top. It is only the second time this has happened. The first was exactly eight years ago, on October 11, 2018, and if everything goes as planned, almost no one will notice. A Chain of Trust, Starting at the Root   The internet's address book was designed in an era when nobody imagined that anyone would lie about an address. A security layer called DNSSEC fixes that by attaching digital signatures to answers, so your device can check that a response hasn't been forged on its way to you. Every one of those checks traces back to a single starting point: the key that signs the root of the DNS. Overseen by ICANN, the nonprofit that coordinates the internet's naming system, this root Key Signing Key was first put into use in 2010. Today, a new key called KSK-2024 replaces its predecessor, KSK-2017, as the only key signing the root's key set. The new key has been quietly sitting in the root zone since January 2025, published but not yet in charge, so that the world's networks had nearly two years to learn to trust it. Swapping a key like this is a bit like changing the locks on a building while people are still walking through the doors. The switch has been planned carefully, and ICANN reports that more than 95% of resolvers reporting their settings have already added the new key. The few that haven't, mostly older or misconfigured systems that validate DNSSEC, could see lookup failures, and ICANN has published guidance for operators and a fallback for anyone caught off guard. The key itself is protected in an unusual way: ICANN holds ceremonies several times a year at secure facilities, where volunteer "trusted community representatives" from around the world use their own credentials to help activate it. Those ceremonies are separate from today's switch, but they are a big reason the system has earned trust.   Every DNSSEC check on the internet traces back to a single key at the top of the system. The first rollover was originally planned for October 2017, but was postponed a year so network operators had more time to prepare, a reminder that the biggest risk in a change like this is rarely the cryptography and usually the people and systems that have to keep up. Today's change is the second act of that story. Older keys will be formally revoked and removed in early 2027, and ICANN has already floated plans for a longer multi-year move to a different cryptographic algorithm later in the decade. For the vast majority of internet users, the day will pass without a single noticeable event, which is exactly the point. The best infrastructure is the kind you never think about, and today is a rare day when a small group of people made sure of that.

■  The Pop Edition October 11: Long Kiss Goodnight at 30, SNL Debuts A Renny Harlin action gamble turns 30, NBC's late-night experiment finds its footing, and a cluster of birthdays span comedy, pop, and prime time. Thirty years of Geena Davis with an axe, and fifty-one of Not Ready for Prime Time Players. October 11 is a date that rewards patience — nothing here is the obvious headline you'd expect, but dig in and it's a solid one. A mid-budget action movie that flopped on arrival is now a cult favorite exactly thirty years later. A sketch show nobody expected to survive its first season is still on the air fifty-one years on. And the birthday list runs from a hip-hop chart-topper to a sitcom mainstay to a heartthrob gone too soon. Here's the full accounting. Born On This Day Cardi B BORN 1992 · TURNS 34 She went from Bronx bartending and viral Instagram rants to a Grammy-winning rap career, breaking chart records with “Bodak Yellow” before most of the industry took her seriously. She's since built a media presence as outsized as her discography. Daryl Hall BORN 1946 · TURNS 80 As half of Hall & Oates, he helped write the biggest-selling duo catalog in pop history, blending blue-eyed soul with radio hooks that never let go. He kept working in his own showcase series long after the duo's commercial peak. Joan Cusack BORN 1962 · TURNS 64 Two Oscar nominations and a career full of scene-stealing supporting turns, from Working Girl to Toy Story 2, made her one of the most reliable character actors of her generation. She's rarely the lead but she's often the reason a scene works. Dawn French BORN 1957 · TURNS 69 One half of French and Saunders, she spent decades as a fixture of British sketch comedy before finding a second life as the title character in The Vicar of Dibley. Her comic timing shaped a generation of UK television. Luke Perry BORN 1966 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 60 He became a teen idol overnight as Dylan McKay on Beverly Hills, 90210, then spent years trying to outrun that image before finding a warmer late-career groove on Riverdale. He died in 2019 following a stroke. Opening Weekend: The Long Kiss Goodnight   Renny Harlin's action thriller opened on October 11, 1996, and it lost money — that's the part the reissue-loving corners of the internet tend to skip. Geena Davis played a suburban schoolteacher who turns out to be an amnesiac government assassin, and Shane Black's screenplay was one of the most sought-after specs in Hollywood, reportedly selling for a then-record sum. The movie itself opened soft against a crowded fall slate and never recouped its budget domestically. What's changed in thirty years is the reputation. Critics at the time called it derivative of Harlin's own Cliffhanger; audiences now cite it as one of the sharper action scripts of the decade, a rare studio film willing to let its female lead be genuinely, cheerfully violent rather than softened for likability. Samuel L. Jackson's supporting turn as a down-on-his-luck private investigator became a template he'd revisit for years. The film's afterlife on cable and home video did more for its standing than its opening weekend ever did, and it's now regularly cited alongside Black's other scripts — Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout — as evidence he understood the genre better than the studios releasing his work.     Prime Time: Saturday Night Live Premieres NBC had no real plan for what it was launching on October 11, 1975. The show aired as NBC's Saturday Night — the Saturday Night Live title was tied up with another program at the time — and it went out live from Studio 8H with George Carlin as host and a cast of unknowns billed as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. The network's own affiliates weren't sure what to do with it; some pre-empted it entirely. It was an odd, loose, occasionally shaky ninety minutes by the standards of what the show would become, closer to a fringe comedy revue than the institution it turned into. Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and the rest of the original cast were paid modestly and given almost no promotional push. What saved it was the timing: late-night television had nothing else like it, and word of mouth from a restless, post-Watergate audience did the rest. Five decades and dozens of cast turnovers later, it remains the only entertainment franchise from that era still running weekly on the same network, in the same studio, with the same closing line that's become as recognizable as any in television.   Meanwhile… 1958NASA launches Pioneer 1, its first attempt at a lunar probe, feeding a space-race obsession that would dominate American pop culture for the next decade. 1967Comedian Artie Lange is born in Union, New Jersey, later a staple of Howard Stern's radio show and MADtv. 1968Apollo 7 launches, NASA's first crewed Apollo mission, broadcast live to television audiences and reviving national interest in the space program. 2013Machete Kills, the gleefully trashy Danny Trejo sequel, opens in theaters. 2019Jexi, starring Adam DeVine as a man whose smartphone assistant develops feelings, opens in theaters. 1962Joan Cusack's future Working Girl co-star era is still decades off, but the Chicago-born character actor is born this year. From an action flop that found redemption on cable to a late-night experiment nobody expected to last a season, October 11 makes the case that first reactions rarely tell the whole story. Sometimes it just takes thirty or fifty years to catch up.