I will not

The nice things about books: once you own them, you own them, forever. No one will be eye tracking your reading habits. No one will make money of you reading the book as many times as you'd like. And the very same book can be read by generations to come. It can last centuries, literally. It's great.

Between the recent heatwave and my post-surgery convalescence, I've been spending a lot of time indoors lately. Here are the #Arctic and non-Arctic books, podcasts and more that have had me dreaming of cooler climes. ❄️ (Also, subscribe for free to my monthly newsletter, Arctic Archives! 👇)

You're gonna need a bigger boat* *scientific understanding of #shark anatomy 🦈

Echoes of Nansen’s Fram expedition!

I think this is my best finish yet—thank you, "Medallion with the Virgin from an Icon Frame," for those 10,000 points Anthropeum.com · Jun 23 2026 🟨🟩🟦🟦🟩🟦🟨🟩🟩🟩 75,716 · top 8% of players today!

Hey, do you live in Maryland, aka the best state in the union 🦀? @thebaltimorebanner.com and @bannermoco.bsky.social put together an amazingly thorough, easy-to-understand voters’ guide that just helped me fill out the most informed primary ballot of my life. Get your questions answered!👇

In North America's Western Great Lakes, thousands of 17th-century glass beads have been found. Introduced by European traders, they quickly reached further than the colonists themselves, emphasising Indigenous participation in emergent global trade. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... 🏺 #Archaeology

setting up my group chat on bsky

In 1808, a globster washed up in the Orkney Islands. Was it the great Arctic sea-worm, described by #Greenland explorers a century earlier, in the flesh? Answering that question proved harder than Edinburgh's and London's top scientists expected. Discover why in the latest #Arctic Archives: ❄️🧪

Just mentioning that the woman on the book’s cover is Josephine Diebitsch Peary, wife of Robert E. Peary, one of the exceptionally few explorers’ wives who actually joined their husbands’ expeditions

Great news! 🙌https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g411k1x1zo

Really looking forward to "The Wreck of the Mentor" by Eric Jay Dolin thanks to this review from @blairbraverman.bsky.social (also kinda funny that the NYT illustrated the review with the same cover image from Dolin's "Leviathan: The History of #Whaling in America" from 2007!) 🎁 link:

One of my top regrets during my (continuing) #Scoresby book research is that I never had a chance to visit Hull’s Maritime Museum. Must start planning my visit now!

Melting permafrost on Svalbard. Our local guide told us this amount of melt used to occur not before mid July.

Well, it’s Pride month, so let’s celebrate the 195th anniversary of the birth of Amelia Edwards, ghost story writer, poet, novelist, pioneering traveller, Egyptologist, campaigner for the preservation of ancient stuff, and someone who “formed emotional attachments almost uniquely with women” 🧵

The oldest hominin footprints ever found are at risk of destruction, researchers warn www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-... "A new investigation alleges that official organizations in Tanzania have imperiled the country's artifacts and remains at four critical human heritage sites..."

This looks amazing! 🐋

Today is the 91st anniversary of the last diary entry of the first man who tried to climb Everest solo. Mind you, his plan had been to crash land a plane 14,000 feet up and then stroll the rest of the way, so perhaps he wasn’t destined to succeed 🧵

2019 "Arctic Hunters, Scoresbysund, Greenland" by photographer Ragnar Axelsson. #arctic

If it’s 25 May, it must be the 167th anniversary of Francis Leopold McClintock finding a skeleton in the Arctic. He was looking for an earlier explorer, Sir John Franklin, who was, by this stage, unlikely to be alive, given that he’d been missing for 14 years 🧵

I realize I sound like old man yelling at clouds but... ...in my day WE READ ALL THE CITATIONS BEFORE WE CITED THEM. That's how you GAIN THE KNOWLEDGE TO CITE THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE. Signed: Someone who literally read two whole books on the color blue just to write a single 1000 word article.

At the risk of old-man-shakes-fist: When I was in j-school a million years ago, if you got any factual error wrong on an assignment — misspelled a name, didn’t get quote exactly right, said the wrong time — you got an F on the whole assignment. Harsh, but made you understand accuracy was EVERYTHING

Currently enjoying the 1960s footage of Greenland’s Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) in this doc

An old favourite reminder that with historical handwriting, beautiful does not equal readable. James Clark Ross, everyone! (It would still totally make for a stunning silk scarf design)

Bad news: El Niño is coming back to wreak weather havoc Good news: The oceans are gay

I love how this story captures the equal ratio of artistic skill and scientific knowledge that goes into natural history dioramas. And styling a raptor with a blowdryer (🎁)

This remarkable colour photograph of hot air balloons at the inaugural Paris Air Show was taken in 1909 by Léon Gimpel, using the Autochrome Lumière process, the first commercial process for colour photography

Vast open territories in the Arctic have been claimed and named as though they were blank white pieces of canvas. But the Indigenous place names that existed long before these new names were invented carry history, culture, and identity. Partner story by the Fram Centre

These are charming! Esp. considering how poor Hood ended up on the 1819-1822 Coppermine expedition (not the better-known 1845 #FranklinExpedition hinted below). These paintings are a nice contrast to George Back’s more intense scenes from the journey

Exactly 100 years ago today, legendary #ArcticExplorer Roald Amundsen and American aviator Lincoln Ellsworth took off in the airship Norge from #Svalbard and sailed over the North Pole. Ellsworth wrote,”with hats off dropped our flags—both the Norwegian and American stuck the landing.”

“We should be at the Pole now. Make a circle. I will take a picture.” 100 years ago #OTD, American aviator Richard Byrd wrote those words to his co-pilot as they became the first to reach the North Pole (or at least pretty close to it) by airplane, heralding a new era in Arctic exploration.

Because they rule duh

Whalers were a lot jauntier back then

2025 tsunami in Tracy Arm, Alaska, measured 481 meters above sea level on shore—only 49 meters less than the biggest landslide-caused tsunami (the 1958 Lituya Bay event) ever recorded! 🌊 🧪

A bust of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, looking appropriately ghostly at the @metmuseum.org

A 19th-century Inuit agiarut, an adaptation from the fiddles of Scottish whalers. It is played on the lap.

May 1926 marks 100 yrs since the first flights to the North Pole. The race was tight: Rivals Roald Amundsen and Richard Byrd used 2 different aircraft, but left from the same place at almost the same time. Who got there first remains controversial. Discover the story in my latest Arctic Archives:

Reports that James Cameron was the winning bidder could not be confirmed

What a cool discovery—thought to be an 18th-century Russian boat built in the Dutch style found in the Norwegian Arctic!

I was pretty heartened by the public's interest in Artemis II and how so many scientists came together to collaborate, build, and discover — despite ~everything else.~ I wrote about another time scientists converged to share their knowledge and hopes 🚀🧪

Found a little friend hiding in my compost bin (common garter snake I believe)

An astronaut's antidote to despair (with help from early polar explorers, the astronauts of the prior century) www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/12/a...

When I was going through my dad’s things after he passed away in 2022, I found a stack of newspapers reporting Apollo 11’s moon landing. I wish he was here to see #ArtemisII

If you could have a party with the most important people in your field, who would you invite? A French astronomer brought scientists from the farthest points of the Earth together for one epic night in April 1824. Discover who was on the guest list in the latest issue of Arctic Archives ...

RIP Jonathan 😭

It would help us a LOT if you were to read and share this; we're trying our best to demonstrate that well-sourced history and archaeology news can be popular, and also to normalise the foregrounding of the peer-reviewed papers that are so often behind the (often sensationalised) stories we see.

Elizabethan artist John White drew the first pictures of Inuit people that Europeans had ever seen. But scholars debate how he did it. Some say White merely painted the Inuit in England, after they arrived as captives in 1577. Here’s why I believe White was actually in the Arctic … 1/15

John White is known as the governor of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated settlement in America. But before that, White showed Europeans their first paintings of Arctic people. Who was John White—and how did he end up in the Arctic? katlong.substack.com/p/an-elizabe...