The Atlantic looks at the I.S.S.’s perfect storm of social media and Cmdr. Chris Hadfield:

Hadfield also had … Chris Hadfield. He was the right guy at the right time — and in, wow, the right place: He’s a natural performer who seemed truly excited to share his sublime stage with the rest of us. But his performances were intimate rather than epic: He subtly rejected the aura of distant heroism we normally associate with space flyers. Instead, he was nerdy. He was excited. He was delightfully, winkily mustachioed. He was your dad, or your uncle, or your mentor, the kind of guy who probably gets a little choked up when he makes toasts at weddings. Which is to say: He is quirky and real, and he made a point of putting those facts to use. He took all the corporate logic of social media — the ethos of the “personal brand,” the edict of “conversation rather than presentation” — and applied it, seamlessly, to his life in space.

Hadfield may have garnered more than 20 million views on YouTube and nearly a million followers on Twitter; but you had the sense, always, that his feeds, full of pictures and poetry and stuff about Canada, was essentially the diary he would have kept even if nobody else could have seen it.