“Look, our snowman is still there,” I said Monday morning. “Oh!” my daughter said. “It is! Mommy, will it be there for all the times?” I picked her up. “No, it won’t,” I said. “I think it will melt. Remember how we talked about snow melting?” “Oh,” my 3-year-old said. “Okay.” Her disappointment was audible. I […]
polar bear
This is a travel story about a place I’ve never been. Maybe it’s a strange destination—a single, cold room. It’s thousands of miles from where I am, though, which makes it seem fascinating based on distance alone. But even better: inside it, you’d find pieces of the whole world. More than 500 million tiny pieces. […]
Last week in Berlin I saw an old friend. Well, several. My college friend Erika, a historian of science who is wrapping up a sabbatical there, and I visited the Museum für Naturkunde – the natural history museum. And there Erika put me in touch with another old friend: Knut the polar bear. Knut was […]
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 […]
I’d just sat down when the first carver approached me. It was my second evening in Iqaluit on southern Baffin Island, 2000 kilometers north of Ottawa, and all around me well-heeled bureaucrats were tucking into Arctic char and steak. But the carver, a small weathered-looking Inuk, skirted them and made a beeline toward me. In […]