Reading Place: Last Gasp of Winter

This time of year, I’m always hoping for one last snowstorm or cold snap. I love winter, and am always sad to see it go. To give the season a proper goodbye, these links celebrate all things cold things cold and snowy:

At Brevity, Amy Butcher reflects on ice skating.

At The New York Review of Books, Ian Frazier reviews a new anthology of writing about the Arctic.

Did you know there is some debate as to whether or not bears actually hibernate in winter? Slate investigates—and also fills you in the sex lives of bears, in case you were wondering.

I live near a cruise ship terminal where the Queen Mary 2 docks, and so I’ve always been curious what it would be like to take it all the way to England. At the New York Times, book reviewer Dwight Garner describes a winter crossing.

Keith Gessen embarks on a considerably less luxurious wintry crossing when he travels with a bulk carrier ship on its journey from Murmansk, Russia, to China. The ship takes a northern route through the Arctic Circle—a route that has only recently been possible, as a result of global warming.

Finally, an elegy for snow.

 

Hannah Gersen is the Dispatches Editor of The Common.

 

Reading Place: Last Gasp of Winter

Related Posts

Thirty-Seven Theses on Time and Memory

SVEN BIRKERTS
Why do we keep hold of certain things, and nothing of others? Now I can remember, with almost cinematic granularity, an afternoon when a veterinarian came to our fifth-grade class to dissect a white rat for our science unit. I feel the heat of the room.

A coffee shop at sunset. The foreground is focused on a cappuccino; the background is blurred out of focus. People sit and talk.

I Am, I Said

DAVID MEISCHEN
Shorts, standard walking shoes. He looked like someone I might meet hiking the Shoal Creek Trail. And not give a second thought. But the glance had happened; the silent exchange had happened. The unspoken had changed me, changed him. I could see what was not visible.

Truck on the highway

Lightning Talk on I-90

ALI SHAPIRO
I was somewhere outside Rome when I saw the grief truck. Seriously? I said aloud, incredulous, to no one. Incredulous, and a little giddy: I couldn’t help but be delighted by signs, even bad ones; I wanted, more than any particular message, evidence of any message at all.