What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

And no, Homer does not use this technique in the Iliad, other than brief verbal allusions back to the original cause of the Trojan war. The Iliad starts in the middle of the conflict, but doesn't repeatedly skip the narrative backward in time; the plot is linear and the the dramatic tension comes from wondering if/when the champion warrior Achilles is going to stop sulking over a perceived insult and rejoin his army to fend off the Trojans.

They are very worried about being fair-minded. They see a vocal minority as social proof that the minority viewpoint is sincere, thoughtful and worthy of consideration. Neither is a bad assumption to start with, but it's not a great place to end the thought process.

I know this is mostly oral history, but that's just not what that means and the writer should have corrected or omitted it.

Hara-kiri means the act of self-disembowelment in a Japanese ritual suicide (seppuku). Not the suicide or the ritual in general, and certainly not killing everyone else in the process, which is Not A Thing in Japan. There were historically sympathy suicides by loyal retainers over matters of honor, but they were voluntary and permission had to be sought in advance. Killing a bunch of other people in despair over your own problem is just murder in Japanese culture, and doesn't have any social legitimacy or a special name.

    Because the article is going on and on while not answering 
    any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen 
    in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went 
    sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on 
    how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What 
    were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences 
    on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the 
    fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained 
    payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform 
    fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule. 
    Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep 
    connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed 
    by the payload specialist a normal thing ever?

As for the rest, the author of the article went to some lengths to explain why information is scarce: most of the crew members are no longer living, Wang won't comment, and NASA apparently prefers not to remark on such a sensitive topic.

It's still quite an informative article, even though (by the author's own admission) questions remain unanswered. If the alternative was to simply not publish the article, I think they chose correctly. I certainly know a lot more about the topic than I did before reading it, which is a fine metric.

    But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping 
    off point, the article is about the human factors