Diane Tsai

Jack Antonoff isn’t timid when it comes to his wardrobe.

“I like to feel like a 7-year-old who’s allowed to dress themselves for the first time or something,” says the musician, who is profiled in the new issue of TIME.

It seems like a pretty spot-on description for the 30-year-old musician behind Bleachers — who rose to popularity as the lead guitarist of Fun. — as he nonchalantly played games and buckled himself into rides at Coney Island’s Luna Park during a recent photo shoot for TIME.

Though there’s a palpable nostalgia in Bleachers’ debut album Strange Desire, Antonoff explains that the record isn’t all about lingering in the past — it’s about looking toward the future.

“I feel like I think about that all the time — how to push on, how to not leave too many of the pieces in the past, how to not take too many of them with you and become strange,” Antonoff says, chuckling.

In the video above, take a behind-the-scenes look at Antonoff’s shoot with photographer Geordie Wood and hear more about the inspiration behind the album.

Sure, the galaxy is still here, but Cosmos is over. The 13-episode reboot of the classic science docu-series came to a close on June 8, and the home video version is already available today, June 10. Host and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stopped by TIME’s studios to look back on what the show accomplished — and it was immediately clear that, even when the show’s cameras aren’t rolling, he’s still very much “on.” Asked to count to ten to check his microphone, he counted down instead, noting that, “In ‘the universe’ we count down, because that’s how you launch rockets. Counting up to a number is pointless.”

Though the show had received a fair amount of attention for its head-on approach to hot-button scientific topics like evolution and climate change, Tyson shrugged off any notion that those issues were “controversial.” They’re just science, he said, and there’s nothing controversial about them.

“If you want to have a controversial conversation with people of different philosophical stripe from you, start with the science and then take it from there,” Tyson said. “Abraham Lincoln founded the National Academy of Sciences, tasked with advising the executive branch — the White House — and Congress on all the ways in which the discoveries of science may influence the running of the state, in an attempt to improve the health, the wealth and the security of all its residents. Lincoln was a Republican, last I checked. His brethren are not behaving consistent with his intent.”

Instead, what viewers should be focusing on is the growing popularity of science. In the show’s finale, Tyson made the point that it’s important to expand the group of people who are involved in the sciences, and he says he’s optimistic about that happening.

But don’t count on another Cosmos to help it along any time soon. The original Cosmos was 13 episodes, as is the more recent version, and Tyson says that it should be seen as more of a documentary than a normal TV show that comes in multiple seasons. Because the show tries to present a unified vision of our place within the universe, it’s not so easy to just create episodes that focus on different scientific topics — and that wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing anyway, since the content needs to be “digested” more than the average TV content does.

“We’re all flattered that people are thinking [about a Season 2] but it’s not clear that this was the kind of content you want to rattle off one year after the next,” he says. “If some years down the line after my life has recovered, maybe. But I’d like science to be shared by all. If someone else came up and wanted to host it, I don’t have any ego invested in the visibility that hosting Cosmos brought to me.”

In the mean time, Tyson is looking forward to a vacation, and to returning to the academic and family roles that got “bulldozed” to make way for TV. Asking him whether he’d be up for another TV gig is, he says, like asking someone who just gave birth when she wants to have another kid. “I’ve never been female, but I’m imagining,” he says, “that that’s when you get punched in the face.”

The 13-episode arc of the revamped version of Cosmos — this year’s take on the classic 1980 Carl Sagan docuseries — draws to a close on June 8. But, as Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and a writer, producer and director of the new Cosmos, tells TIME, there’s still a long way left to go — both in the field of science, and in the world.

With respect to the big picture, Druyan says that she was surprised that negative response to the show’s forthright discussion of controversial topics like evolution and global warming was so “limp.” Cosmos has “torqued the zeitgeist,” in her words, making science seem cool and worth talking about. (Seeing astronomer Jan Oort trending on Twitter was a highlight of her experience this season.) But there’s work to be done, she says.

“I’m really optimistic. I was born that way, but I also feel that there’s so much reason to hope,” she says.

And there’s work to be done on a human scale, too.

One of the scientists featured in the finale will be Vera Rubin, an astronomer whom Druyan describes as a personal hero. Rubin, as Druyan relates in the video above, couldn’t even get an application for graduate school because she was a woman; she went on to make important discoveries about dark matter.

Druyan experienced a lesser version of that same bias in her own life, but that’s another thing she’s optimistic about. “I certainly experienced a huge amount of sexism. I was very lucky to have a valiant champion in Carl Sagan, who didn’t have that kind of attitude, but I remember routinely being dismissed, interrupted — I’d say something and people at a meeting would turn to Carl or someone else and say, that was a really great idea you had,” she says. “One of the reasons I’m so optimistic is I have seen major changes in that blindness and so many other forms of blindness in my lifetime, and some of the most optimistic people couldn’t have anticipated them.”

Cosmos, she hopes, will be a way to convince girls and boys to keep opening science to different kinds of people. That’s why the show is structured the way it is: relaying the stories of the lives of scientists rather than just their discoveries. “So many of the stories of the heroes of knowledge that we tell in the series were people who were written off because they were too poor or because they were female or for other reasons. The community of science has a lot to answer for because for so long it was so exclusive,” she says. “It’s only in recent times that it’s changed.”

The Cosmos team has provided TIME with a first look at the Cosmos making-of documentary special feature that will come with the Blu-ray of the show, which will be released June 10:

While Qatar’s top English newspaper boasts headlines such as “Obama thanks Qatar for assistance as Taliban free American soldier,” it’s still unclear exactly what role the Qatari government played in the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Qatar’s foreign minister Dr. Khalid Al Attiyah was reluctant to go into much detail, according to CNN. “In any case, when Qatar takes on such a task of mediation, it bases that on a basic principle of our foreign policy, and that is the humanitarian consideration,” Attiyah said, after explaining that he was not prepared to talk in-depth about the prisoner release.

The Qatari government has also not addressed what might be the bigger question at hand: how it intends to contain the five Taliban leaders released from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for Bergdahl’s freedom, who will be held in Qatar under undisclosed circumstances.