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 […]
Helen
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 […]
LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in January 2014, and I thought it would be nice to give it another outing during the holidays. People have been singing Christmas carols in the pubs in villages around Sheffield, in the north of England, for hundreds of […]
I have, objectively speaking, done a lot of cool stuff in my life. I once spent six weeks on an icebreaker in the Bering Sea. I’ve seen toucans, monkeys, and whales in the wild. I keep going to Switzerland. I was once on the local news in Kumamoto, Japan. Actually, it may have been twice. […]
