Picture Venus. You know, the second planet from the sun, where the clouds are shot through with sulfuric acid and the surface is hot enough to melt lead.

What color is it?

For the longest time, I thought of Venus as caramel-colored, swirled with golds, yellows, and browns—warm colors that matched the planet’s reputation for being a scorching world covered in volcanoes. And then I saw a picture of Venus that James O’Donoghue, a planetary astronomer, shared online recently. It was not any toasty shade, not even close. It was milky-white and featureless. A big old space pearl. “This is what it looks like to a human being flying by,” O’Donoghue wrote in his post.

Whaaat? That couldn’t be right. I went to my bookshelf and pulled out some space books, flipping to their pages on Venus. In National Geographic’s Space Atlas, Second Edition: amber. In The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration: butterscotch. In a thick magazine called the Book of the Solar System: gold. My editor sent me pictures of the illustrations from her toddler’s books on the solar system, and they showed more of the same. It seemed as if we had all been bamboozled, hoodwinked, led astray. I had seen pictures of Venus in muted shades before—I’d used one in a story about the planet’s atmosphere—but this other nondescript, alabaster world seemed wrong. It didn’t resemble a planet frequently described as “hellish,” where the surface conditions have crumpled any spacecraft that made it through the poison clouds and dared to land.

I was so stunned that I reached out to one of my best Venus sources and demanded, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Suddenly I had questions about the whole solar system, and so did the rest of The Atlantic’s Science desk. As one of my colleagues asked, when I told him about the true nature of Venus, “Is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot even red?”

It turns out that almost nothing in space is quite as vibrant as you think it is. Venus is only the beginning.

[Read: Venus, the best and brightest]

The most widespread image of Venus—as an ochre, almost molten world—isn’t a real picture, at least not in the typical way we think of pictures; it was made using radio waves. In the early ’90s, a NASA spacecraft equipped with radar technology settled into orbit around Venus. Every time the probe, named Magellan, came close to the planet, it collected strips of data from all over Venus and sent them back to Earth. Eventually, the mission amassed enough strips to produce the first-ever radar map of the Venusian surface. We can’t see radio waves, so astronomers translated them into colors that we can. They could have picked any color palette, O’Donoghue told me. He imagines they went with this particular set “because it befit the harsh, burnt landscape of Venus.”

The Magellan shot was a significant upgrade over existing images of Venus’s exterior, captured by a space probe in the ’70s, which showed creamy-white cloud tops and not much else. Suddenly, mountains and craters were visible. The scientists who study Venus loved the orangey version, even though it was an interpretation, Martha Gilmore, a planetary geologist at Wesleyan University who studies the Venusian surface, told me. “That color has permeated the Venus community since then,” she said. “It’s in our logos.”

Sorry to our human eyeballs, but apparently Venus just looks better in wavelengths we can’t visually process. Because its sulfuric-acid clouds are so bright and reflective, “the planet itself looks pretty bland from space in the visible spectrum,” Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University who studies Venus, told me. That image of a muted Venus I’d used before was the planet in ultraviolet. Where the radar image helped tease out Venus’s surface features, ultraviolet brought out swirly structures in its fast-moving clouds.

Left: The Magellan image of Venus, constructed from radar data (NASA/JPL-Caltech). Right: Venus in ultraviolet, as captured by NASA’s Mariner 10 probe (Mattias Malmer; NASA/JPL).

[Read: The Photoshoppers behind dreamy Jupiter photos]

Like Venus’s classic portrait, most of the pictures of planets and other astronomical objects that you’ve seen, in textbooks or on NASA websites, are not natural-color views. They’re rendered in different wavelengths, stitched together from raw data. Or the colors that really would be visible to the naked eye are adjusted in some way, heightened in order to show a more textured view of these worlds, to make their features pop, whether mountains or storms. “We don’t turn up our noses at artificial color,” Candy Hansen, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who leads the imaging team on a Jupiter mission, once told me. “We love artificial color.”

So although in most pictures the Great Red Spot looks like a glob of marinara, in natural color the giant storm is more of a dusty rose. Seen from space, Mars is more brown than red. Saturn isn’t really so yellow; it’s actually the kind of nice neutral you’d paint a living room. Uranus is more gray than it is teal, and Neptune is a lovely azure, but not that blue. Pluto’s heart-shaped glacier doesn’t stand out as much in true color.

[Read: Astronomers are now obsessed with a particular gas on Venus]

And the sun? “The sun is nearly always depicted as yellow-orange when in space, even though it’s actually white in space,” O’Donoghue said. “It’s actually a lot of extra work to pull off a realistic sun in a space graphic, because a white ball looks really odd.” Once again, whaaat?

So if Venus is a ping-pong ball on the outside, what color is it below the clouds? Scientists know that the surface is made of rock that resembles basalt found on Earth, which is dark gray, Byrne said. But chemical reactions between the rock and the atmosphere could turn the surface reddish. The Soviet missions that landed on the Venusian surface in the ’70s and ’80s took color photographs, revealing a yellowy landscape, before they succumbed to the harsh environment. But the true color was difficult to determine because Venus’s atmosphere filters out blue light.

Astronomers will get a fresh look when a new NASA mission, designed to fly right through Venus’s atmosphere and toward the surface, arrives in the early 2030s. Those pictures will be in near-infrared wavelengths, but astronomers will once again translate them into more distinct colors for the public to marvel at. Those images are bound to be stunning in their own way, but now that I’m past the shock of it, I can understand the appeal of Venus the way we’d see it ourselves, as the pearl of the solar system. “It’s a beautiful planet,” Byrne said. “Even if there’s, like, a bunch of different ways to die there.”

There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why?

Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game?

[Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is naive about Russia. Ukraine can’t afford to be.]

To explain why requires some history, but not the semi-mythological, faux-medieval history Putin has used in the past to declare that Ukraine is not a country, or that its existence is an accident, or that its sense of nationhood is not real. Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic—though it is true that the Soviet ties of the Russian president, most notably his years spent as a KGB officer, matter a great deal. Indeed, many of his tactics—the use of sham Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his war in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a puppet government in Crimea—are old KGB tactics, familiar from the Soviet past. Fake political groupings played a role in the KGB’s domination of Central Europe after World War II; sham separatists played a role in the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine itself in 1918.

Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders.

But the most significant influence on Putin’s worldview has nothing to do with either his KGB training or his desire to rebuild the U.S.S.R. Putin and the people around him have been far more profoundly shaped, rather, by their path to power. That story—which has been told several times, by the authors Fiona Hill, Karen Dawisha, and most recently Catherine Belton—begins in the 1980s. The later years of that decade were, for many Russians, a moment of optimism and excitement. The policy of glasnost—openness—meant that people were speaking the truth for the first time in decades. Many felt the real possibility of change, and they thought it could be change for the better.

[Kori Schake: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is backfiring]

Putin missed that moment of exhilaration. Instead, he was posted to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he endured the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy. As the world’s television screens blared out the news of the Cold War’s end, Putin and his KGB comrades in the doomed Soviet satellite state were frantically burning all of their files, making calls to Moscow that were never returned, fearing for their lives and their careers. For KGB operatives, this was not a time of rejoicing, but rather a lesson about the nature of street movements and the power of rhetoric: democracy rhetoric, antiauthoritarian rhetoric, anti-totalitarian rhetoric. Putin, like his role model Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution there, concluded from that period that spontaneity is dangerous. Protest is dangerous. Talk of democracy and political change is dangerous. To keep them from spreading, Russia’s rulers must maintain careful control over the life of the nation. Markets cannot be genuinely open; elections cannot be unpredictable; dissent must be carefully “managed” through legal pressure, public propaganda, and, if necessary, targeted violence.

But although Putin missed the euphoria of the ’80s, he certainly took full part in the orgy of greed that gripped Russia in the ’90s. Having weathered the trauma of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to the Soviet Union and joined his former colleagues in a massive looting of the Soviet state. With the assistance of Russian organized crime as well as the amoral international offshore-money-laundering industry, some of the former Soviet nomenklatura stole assets, took the money out of the country, hid it abroad, and then brought the cash back and used it to buy more assets. Wealth accumulated; a power struggle followed. Some of the original oligarchs landed in prison or exile. Eventually Putin wound up as the top billionaire among all the other billionaires—or at least the one who controls the secret police.

This position makes Putin simultaneously very strong and very weak, a paradox that many Americans and Europeans find hard to understand. He is strong, of course, because he controls so many levers of Russia’s society and economy. Try to imagine an American president who controlled not only the executive branch—including the FBI, CIA, NSA—but also Congress and the judiciary; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, and all of the other newspapers; and all major businesses, including Exxon, Apple, Google, and General Motors.

Putin’s control comes without legal limits. He and the people around him operate without checks and balances, without ethics rules, without transparency of any kind. They determine who can be a candidate in elections, and who is allowed to speak in public. They can make decisions from one day to the next—sending troops to the Ukrainian border, for example—after consulting no one and taking no advice. When Putin contemplates an invasion, he does not have to consider the interest of Russian businesses or consumers who might suffer from economic sanctions. He doesn’t have to take into account the families of Russian soldiers who might die in a conflict that they don’t want. They have no choice, and no voice.

And yet at the same time, Putin’s position is extremely precarious. Despite all of that power and all of that money, despite total control over the information space and total domination of the political space, Putin must know, at some level, that he is an illegitimate leader. He has never won a fair election, and he has never campaigned in a contest that he could lose. He knows that the political system he helped create is profoundly unfair, that his regime not only runs the country but owns it, making economic and foreign-policy decisions that are designed to benefit the companies from which he and his inner circle personally profit. He knows that the institutions of the state exist not to serve the Russian people, but to steal from them. He knows that this system works very well for a few rich people, but very badly for everyone else. He knows, in other words, that one day, prodemocracy activists of the kind he saw in Dresden might come for him too.

[From the January/February 2018 issue: What Putin really wants]

Putin’s awareness that his legitimacy is dubious has been on public display since 2011, soon after his rigged “reelection” to a constitutionally dubious third term. At that time, large crowds appeared not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but several dozen other cities as well, protesting electoral fraud and elite corruption. Protesters mocked the Kremlin as a regime of “crooks and thieves,” a slogan popularized by the democracy activist Alexei Navalny; later, Putin’s regime would poison Navalny, nearly killing him. The dissident is now in a Russian jail. But Putin wasn’t just angry at Navalny. He also blamed America, the West, foreigners trying to destroy Russia. The Obama administration had, he said, organized the demonstrators; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of all people, had “given the signal” to start the protests. He had won the election, he declared with great passion, tears seeming to well up in his eyes, despite the “political provocations that pursue the sole objective of undermining Russia's statehood and usurping power.”

In his mind, in other words, he wasn’t merely fighting Russian demonstrators; he was fighting the world’s democracies, in league with enemies of the state. Whether he really believed that crowds in Moscow were literally taking orders from Hillary Clinton is unimportant. He certainly understood the power of democratic language, of the ideas that made Russians want a fair political system, not a kleptocracy controlled by Putin and his gang, and he knew where they came from. Over the subsequent decade, he would take the fight against democracy to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, where he would support extremist groups and movements in the hope of undermining European democracy. Russian state-controlled media would support the campaign for Brexit, on the grounds that it would weaken Western democratic solidarity, which it has. Russian oligarchs would invest in key industries across Europe and around the world with the aim of gaining political traction, especially in smaller countries like Hungary and Serbia. And, of course, Russian disinformation specialists would intervene in the 2016 American election.

[David Frum: Fox News abandons the GOP on Russia]

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia. But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin. Young Ukrainians were chanting anti-corruption slogans, just like the Russian opposition does, and waving European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals that Putin hates at home and seeks to overturn abroad. After Ukraine’s profoundly corrupt, pro-Russian president fled the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began showing pictures of his palace, complete with gold taps, fountains, and statues in the yard—exactly the kind of palace Putin inhabits in Russia. Indeed, we know he inhabits such a palace because one of the videos produced by Navalny has already shown us pictures of it, along with its private ice-hockey rink and its hookah bar.

Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution. The invasion also violated both written and unwritten rules and treaties in Europe, demonstrating Putin’s scorn for the Western status quo. Following that “success,” Putin launched a much broader attack: a series of attempted coups d’état in Odessa, Kharkiv, and several other cities with a Russian-speaking majority. This time, the strategy failed, not least because Putin profoundly misunderstood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial nostalgia. They did not. Only in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine where Putin was able to move in troops and heavy equipment from across the border, did a local coup succeed. But even there he did not create an attractive “alternative” Ukraine. Instead, the Donbas—the coal-mining region that surrounds Donetsk—remains a zone of chaos and lawlessness.

It’s a long way from the Donbas to France or the Netherlands, where far-right politicians hang around the European Parliament and take Russian money to go on “fact-finding missions” to Crimea. It’s a longer way still to the small American towns where, back in 2016, voters eagerly clicked on pro-Trump Facebook posts written in St. Petersburg. But they are all a part of the same story: They are the ideological answer to the trauma that Putin and his generation of KGB officers experienced in 1989. Instead of democracy, they promote autocracy; instead of unity, they try constantly to create division; instead of open societies, they promote xenophobia. Instead of letting people hope for something better, they promote nihilism and cynicism.

Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail.

These are big goals, and they might not be achievable. But Putin’s beloved Soviet Union also had big, unachievable goals. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors wanted to create an international revolution, to subjugate the entire world to the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. Ultimately, they failed—but they did a lot of damage while trying. Putin will also fail, but he too can do a lot of damage while trying. And not only in Ukraine.

In 2019, a 60-year-old Emma Thompson explained her sudden career renaissance. She had spent her youth playing romantic leads, but once she turned 40, she said, she could fill such roles only “in a pinch.” The offers became more limited, the parts smaller: a batty clairvoyant in the Harry Potter series; a wronged wife in Love Actually; the voice inside Will Ferrell’s head in Stranger Than Fiction. Then another decade passed, and the opportunities became interesting again. Hallelujah! In the past five years alone, Thompson has played a High Court judge in The Children Act, an uptight television host in Late Night, and the British prime minister (twice).

Thompson had experienced what we might call “the dry decade.” The midlife plight of women in Hollywood was immortalized in an Amy Schumer sketch that achieved instant cult status when it aired six years ago. Three actresses are enjoying a picnic in a wooded glade, celebrating one of their number’s “Last Fuckable Day.” The women around the table—Patricia Arquette, Tina Fey, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—are all attractive, smart, and funny. But that doesn’t matter. They’re over the hill in Hollywood’s eyes. Fey notes that eventually, women realize that the poster for their movie is “just, like, a picture of a kitchen.” Louis-Dreyfus adds that such films have “these very uplifting and yet vague titles, like Whatever It Takes or She Means Well.”

In 2012, two economists from Clemson University analyzed the gender balance of American films from 1920 to 2011 and offered a more wonkish take on the phenomenon. Overall, they found that men accounted for two-thirds of all roles in mainstream movies. For starring roles, however, age is everything. At 20, women play four-fifths of leads: Hollywood is very interested in them at their nubile prime. Fast-forward to 40, and that statistic is reversed. Men utterly dominate the juiciest parts. The male-female gender split then hovers around 80–20 until, well, death.

[Read: When Hollywood’s power players were women]

For the few women actors who come out the other side of the dry decade, the rewards can be mixed. No longer able to portray ingenues, brides-to-be, or manic pixie dream girls, or be the Avengers’ diversity hire (sorry, Black Widow), older actresses graduate into the other popular category open to women: hags and harpies. Meryl Streep once described the parts she was offered after 50 as women who were “gorgons or dragons or in some way grotesque.” Sure enough, Thompson’s late-career roles also include the Baroness in Cruella, Goneril in a TV-movie version of King Lear, and Miss Trunchbull in the upcoming musical adaptation of Matilda. Monsters, one and all.

But biology, it turns out, needn’t be destiny. A new generation of actresses has discovered an answer to the dry decade, and is showing the rest of us what we’ve been missing—stories that capture the fullness of women’s lives.

To understand the problem (and because the experience is always pleasant), consider Tom Hanks. He might be “America’s Dad,” but his career represents a type of ageless versatility long afforded by the film industry—to male actors. In his 30s, Hanks wooed Elizabeth Perkins in Big, Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, and Robin Wright in Forrest Gump. (I am excluding Beasley, the dog from Turner & Hooch, from this analysis, though IMDb sadly records that Beasley never worked again.) Hanks’s next decade was anything but dry. In his 40s, he played an FBI agent in Catch Me If You Can, a Mob enforcer in Road to Perdition, Woody in Toy Story, and a man stranded on a deserted island in Cast Away, among other roles.

But what about his female co-stars? Their 40s were not exactly dazzling. At 41, Meg Ryan jettisoned her sweet, goofy image in In the Cut, playing an English teacher drawn into a sexual relationship with a potential serial killer. The critical reception dwelled on the film’s erotic atmosphere, and Ryan’s onscreen nudity was greeted as an unwelcome surprise. She has since said that the film marked a “turning point” from which her career never recovered.

Neither Elizabeth Perkins nor Robin Wright fared well in the film industry, either. But they did have success elsewhere—and this is where the story of the dry decade takes an intriguing turn. Perkins spent her mid-to-late 40s on Showtime’s Weeds, as the lead character’s narcissist neighbor, Celia—and earned three Emmy nominations for the role. At 46, Wright started playing Claire Underwood in House of Cards, and by the final season had graduated from first lady to president.

Perkins and Wright were among the first wave of women to benefit from the golden age of television. Since then, the streaming wars have created a huge demand for new dramas, and the increased opportunities are obvious. In her 40s, Reese Witherspoon has starred in Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Morning Show. (As a bonus, the last of these also rescued Jennifer Aniston from a film industry that never quite seemed to know what to do with her.) The HBO remake of Scenes From a Marriage gave 44-year-old Jessica Chastain a role every bit as challenging as an Ibsen heroine. At 46, Sandra Oh began playing a weary spy locked in a deadly pas de deux with a glamorous assassin in Hulu’s Killing Eve. And at the same age, Kate Winslet undertook one of the standout roles of her career, as Mare Sheehan, the stoic detective in HBO’s Mare of Easttown.

Compared with the dead ends that Ryan, Perkins, and Wright encountered in traditional Hollywood, the trajectory for female stars is thriving on the competition among HBO, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and others. A glut of roles now combine the personal and the professional, offering a chance not to be pigeonholed as “the wife” or “the mom”—or, conversely, the career woman free of domestic responsibilities. Think about the dry decade: It has amounted to a desert of roles between love interest and empty nester, as Hollywood has struggled to incorporate the challenges of motherhood into narratives about women engaged elsewhere too.

[From the December 2009 issue: Double-X films]

The 2010 film Salt, about a CIA spy accused of being a Russian sleeper agent, is a notorious example of the basic motherhood problem. Originally intended for Tom Cruise, the script was rewritten for its eventual star, Angelina Jolie. That entailed one big change: Edwin Salt was a parent; Evelyn Salt was not. “If a woman had a child, I think it would be very hard for us not to imagine her kind of holding on to that child through the entire film,” Jolie said at the time. “Which is strange—but I think audiences would allow a man to have a child and the child [could] be with the wife back at home.” (When making Salt, Jolie herself was a working mother of six children, including 2-year-old twins.)

Television series are hungry for plotlines, and their cast lists spread like tree roots as seasons progress, giving women new room to grow. In stark contrast to the narrowness of Jolie’s role in Salt, Keri Russell transitioned from her late 30s into her 40s as Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans, navigating the identities of mother, travel agent, and Soviet spy. In The Queen’s Gambit, deft touches filled out the portrait of Beth Harmon’s alcoholic adoptive mother, Alma, played by Marielle Heller, who had recently turned 40.

In accommodating characters who are mothers, without that being their only identity, television has brought new tensions and texture to established genres. Where male detectives have tended—to the point of cliché—to be troubled, maverick loners, Olivia Colman’s Ellie Miller found her investigations complicated by her own family turmoil and deep links to the local town in the British crime show Broadchurch. Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan is similarly embedded in her community, at the center of a loving, chaotic, and grieving clan in the kind of suburb where everyone has secrets and everyone is trying to cope: with addiction, with loss, with something as mundane as America’s lack of affordable child care.

The wide-angle lens of television invites immersion in a pivotal midlife decade that—for anyone juggling a career, children, and aging parents, as well as their own compromises, regrets, and unfulfilled ambitions—is anything but dry. “I always imagined I’d be a cop,” Mare tells a younger police officer. “It’s the life around me I didn’t expect to fall apart so spectacularly.”

This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “Women of a Certain Age.”