Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction completes the full reveal from handwritten manuscript to polished and published — I’m starting to feel like a voyeur, peering intently into Laura Ingalls Wilder’s naked writing process. Draft after draft of a book, from the first handwritten copy that was little more than a stream-of-consciousness retelling of childhood stories to a polished, engaging children’s chapter book. Finding and losing a publisher…

Our experience of warming defines each generation, from Laura Ingalls Wilder through Generation Alpha. The Xennial generation, a microgeneration sandwiched between Gen X and Millenials, has a few defining characteristics. Computers arrived in classrooms during their childhood. They spent their youth offline but entered adulthood as the technology matured. Xennials…

“Bro culture” and storm chasing make a toxic mix There’s something in the air around storms in the last few years, and it isn’t just moisture and helicity. It’s in the increasingly aggressive and dangerous driving — blasting through stop signs, whipping around slow cars on rain-soaked shoulders, making reckless…

The winter of 2022–2023 is ending. How did it measure up where you live? The beginning and end of winter is defined in many different ways, but for meteorologists and climatologists, it is tied to the calendar months — December, January, and February. It’s the season now for winter recap…

Add these books to your yearly reading list! The new year brings a blank slate for book reading lists — a time to invite challenges, swap recommendations with friends, and reset books-read counts for the year. Weather makes for a compelling story. It’s impactful, it’s dramatic, and it’s universal. Everyone…

Pa Ingalls might have trusted the muskrats, but science has given us more reliable winter outlooks. On a prairie in east central South Dakota in 1880, Pa Ingalls paused his haying work to study the muskrat houses with his preteen daughter, Laura. With a shake of his head, he showed…

What do you debate your spouse about? As a couple of meteorologists, we definitely debate the weather. My spouse is convinced that this year has been unusually dry, and we aren’t getting our usual nighttime thunderstorms. I think it’s just a little dry. We both agree it’s going to get…

When you grow up in an American Legion veterans-only settlement, you grow up understanding a few things. Flag codes. The difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. And fireworks on Independence Day. On the shores of Higgins Lake, Michigan, in a settlement now known as Camp Curnalia, small cottages crowd…

There’s hot, like the typical heat of summer when children’s popsicles melt down their wrists before they can eat the whole thing, and the cool water from the garden hose is perfect to wipe away sweat and sticky dribbles. …