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This is an version of The Wonder Reader, a publication by which our editors advocate a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up right here to get it each Saturday morning.
Shortly after our author Katherine J. Wu, “a born-and-bred Californian,” moved to Boston, she was met with an epic snowstorm—one so dangerous that the town ran out of locations to dump the snow piles. As you’ll be able to think about, she wasn’t thrilled. But now, greater than eight years later, local weather change is threatening winter snow in Boston and the remainder of New England, she writes: “Snow may someday cover New England’s landscape for only about six weeks a year, about half the norm of recent decades.”
If you don’t love snow, that may not sound like such a tragedy. But, as Katie notes, “nature’s dandruff” has actual advantages for Earth’s wildlife. It acts as an insulator for fragile soil, “swaddling it like a fluffy down coat,” she writes. “Plants and microbes thrive beneath it. Animals burrow inside of it to evade predators.”
Snow, after all, additionally has a means of displaying us the fantastic thing about the world in a brand new means. “I wonder how I will describe snow to a generation that might only rarely get to see it—how I will explain to children of the future why Norman Rockwell paintings look so white,” Katie writes. She may look to those traces from The Atlantic, written in 1862 by an nameless contributor, concerning the calm of the morning after a snowstorm:
The air sparkles just like the snow; the whole lot appears dry and resonant, just like the wooden of a violin … On such a day, the universe appears to carry however three pure tints—blue, white, and inexperienced … That sensation we poor mortals typically have, of being simply on the sting of infinite magnificence, but with at all times a lingering movie between, by no means presses down extra intently than on days like this.
Today, we’re taking a second to understand snow—and a number of the surprising items it brings when it falls.
On Snow
For Adults, Snow Days Feel Like Divine Permission to Rest
By Helena Fitzgerald
Snow is an excuse to give attention to magnificence as a substitute of productiveness, journey as a substitute of accomplishment.
How Children Conjure a Snow Day
By Kate Cray
Spoons beneath pillows, ice cubes in the bathroom, and different rituals to name forth snow
By Cullen Murphy
Watching it, understanding it, and forecasting it’s a surprisingly giant and complicated enterprise.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
I’ll go away you with a snow reality from the 1862 Atlantic article that charmed me: According to the author, snow has been known as “wooly water, or wet wool” by some all through historical past. (The comparability between snow and wool additionally exists in a Biblical psalm.)
— Isabel