By Ben Crnic Last year, on the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight, there was an eruption of media stories. I passed on the hoopla, waiting instead for what I considered the more important 101st anniversary, which will take place this Friday. Last year’s centennial was the proper time to celebrate the human […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Our lives are sprinkled with new years. Most popular is the calendar year. Most exciting is the school year. Most regular is the astronomical year. Most political is the fiscal year. Most invisible is the water year, which begins and ends on Oct. 1. This is the arbitrary date marking the […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Environmental politics is so much hot air I sometimes don’t know which way to whirl. Take the Keystone XL pipeline project, which is designed to link the oil-thirsty United States to the tar sandstone of Alberta. It’s been under environmental review since September 2008 when TransCanada applied for a permit from […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I have an unusual type of seasonal affective disorder, known as SAD. During these darkening days, I don’t get sad at all. In fact, I find it progressively easier to extract hope from failure. Feeding my SAD this year was a recent story by Steve Grant about New England’s collective failure […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Harvard advances. Yale retreats. I’m not talking about the annual football game between the Harvard Crimson and the Yale Bulldogs, scheduled for Nov. 18. I’m talking about two tidewater glaciers in Prince William Sound, Alaska, one named Harvard, the other Yale. Knowing something about the forward and backward behaviors of these […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Loaded Dice. The perfect analogy for deciding whether our weirdly warm winter was the result of climate change or luck. I heard this from climatologist Michael Mann, who visited the University of Connecticut last week to round out this year’s Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series. Just as loading the dice with […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson During a summer dominated by bad international news — Ebola, ISIS, climate change — I made a conscious choice to be positive about something that really bothers me. So, I decided to share my attitude adjustment before summer officially ends Sept. 22. My moment of choice came at Echo Lake, near […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson ‘Property Values Drop, So Do Town Grand Lists.” This was the subhead on a story this month by Kathleen McWilliams in The Courant. Normally such stories are about rising crime, neighborhood blight or corporate closings. But in this case it’s about disintegrating home basements in northeastern Connecticut that can cost up […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Shore Up Connecticut is a policy mistake. A state loan program named Shore Back Connecticut would make more sense because retreat from the coast is the only viable long-term option. Recent developments in Antarctica have made this crystal clear. As I write, the edge of the Thwaites Glacier is thinning and […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson This year’s ice jam on the Connecticut River was a potentially dangerous spectacle, making it a perfect stage for political theater. It was also a perfectly natural, noncatastrophic event that, to my dismay, was distorted by the media. Slipping away from the grime and sleaze of Washington, D.C., U.S. Sen. Richard […]