On December 6, 2005, a polar bear was born in captivity. His mother rejected him and his twin, and his twin died. The survivor was an adorable baby polar bear, but that phrase doesn’t need the initial adjective, does it? A baby polar bear is a little puffball, white with button eyes and perfect and […]
March 9-13, 2015 On Friday the 13th, Cassie told us the sad story of the people who died after taking a perfectly reasonable-seeming medicine, and what that means for the drugs we take today. Ann told us what today’s brilliant young astronomers are up to: crazy stuff, like figuring out a rule of thumb for […]
I am on the record as loving snow and cheerfully tolerating cold. So you’d think I would love winter. And I do, mostly. But as of this week, I am very much ready for winter to pack up its bags and leave the D.C. area. The reason: ice. Ice is the worst. Ok, it’s good […]
The other morning when I left for work, it was 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside. How you feel about that statement probably depends on where you live. Well, first, if you live outside the U.S., you might be wondering what that means, so I’ll tell you: it’s -11 Celsius. You’re impressed now, right? If, like my […]
Friday morning, if all goes well, NASA is launching a satellite with the name SMAP. As I write late Thursday night, it’s perched atop a Delta II rocket an hour up the California coast from Santa Barbara. It was supposed to launch this morning, but high-altitude winds got in the way. Like so many things […]
On Tuesday two people who I met a few years ago posted similar pictures. One still lives in the town of Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, where I briefly lived; the other, last I heard, had moved even farther north, to somewhere in the Norwegian wilds. Each posted a picture showing the […]
The first snow of the year, and the first noticeable snow of this winter, fell here in D.C. on Tuesday. Yes, we know that our reaction to snow makes no sense. No, we don’t have enough snowplows. No, we don’t know how to drive in snow. You’re very clever for noticing, People Who Live In […]
The People of LWON began a brief period of holiday rest by telling you what TV shows and movies you might binge-watch on your winter break, from the TV spinoff of a series of comic book movies to Scandinavian drama. A lot of Scandinavian drama. What do you like to read during the dark winter […]
