Winter is the shortest season of the year, at least astronomically.

Weather-wise, though, it’s a whole different story. Even if you enjoy this season, winter starts to get a little old by late February for most folks. Maybe you’re already dreaming hard about summer!

Astronomical winter is the shortest season of the calendar year because the Earth travels faster around the sun at this time of year. Earth’s 365.25-day orbit around the sun is not exactly circular, but slightly elliptical or oval-ish. This time of year, Earth is around three million miles closer to the sun than it is in the summer. Because we’re closer, the sun has a stronger gravitational tug on our world that causes the Earth to whirl more rapidly in the winter. The same thing happens when you tie a string around, say, a donut, and swing it horizontally above your head. If you shorten the length of the string and swing it with the same force, the donut will move faster around your head. At this time of year, the “string” between the Earth and the sun is shorter, so the Earth moves faster.

So how much faster? Quite a bit! Right now, Earth is chugging along on its orbital track at well over 67,500 miles per hour, more than 2000 mph faster than it does in the summer. Because of that lazier summer pace, it takes 94 days to go from the first day of summer to the first day of autumn, but because the Earth races at a faster pace in winter, it only takes 89 days to travel from the first day of winter to the first day of astronomical spring. Feel better about winter now?

So how would you like to fast-forward to summer? It’s possible with a time machine: your alarm clock. Get out of the sack and under the stars about an hour before morning twilight, and you can see the same night sky that you will see in the early evening right around the Fourth of July. You can experience early summer in the middle of winter, at least in the heavens. Summer stars without mosquitoes!

(Mike Lynch)

The particular set of constellations and their placement in the sky at any one time depends on what direction into space your part of the Earth is facing. That’s controlled by both the Earth’s 24-hour rotation on its axis and its slow orbit around the sun. It just so happens that before morning twilight from our vantage point in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin we’re facing the same direction in space as we do in the early evening in early July. Any time of year, if you want to get an advanced viewing of your evening skies four to five months in the future, check out the sky just before morning twilight invades.

Armed with a hot cup of coffee, you can enjoy summer constellations this week in the pre-dawn sky like Bootes the hunting farmer, Cygnus the swan, Delphinus the dolphin, Scorpius the scorpion, Sagittarius the Archer, and more. Hopefully, your preview of the summer night heavens will tide you over until summer weather finally arrives!

(Mike Lynch)

Celestial happening this week: This coming Thursday night the waxing gibbous moon will be above and a little to the right of the very bright planet Jupiter. The largest planet of our solar system is the brightest star-like object in the night sky right now! With a small telescope or maybe even binoculars see if you can spot up to four of its moons that resemble tiny stars that flank both sides of Jupiter.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

 

Disenchanted voters are fleeing the Democratic and Republican parties in droves. Their exodus is perpetuating the skyrocketing partisanship they seek to escape.

Gallup published polling in January showing that as of last year, 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents, a record high. The migration began around 2008, with the election of President Barack Obama, and has spiked since. It’s most pronounced among Generation X (Americans born 1965–1980); Millennials (1981–1996) and Generation Z (1997–2007).

Despite what independents might see as the Democratic and Republican parties’ dispiriting stranglehold on American politics, the parties as institutions have never been weaker. They’ve lost considerable control over fundraising and resource distribution; are virtually powerless to block ideologically extreme (or worse) candidates from winning primaries; and have shrinking influence over their own policy platforms.

These developments have coincided directly with the rise of partisanship in American politics. Indeed, the two phenomena are intertwined.

“They’re definitely related,” said Johanna Dunaway, a political scientist at Syracuse University and research director for the school’s Washington-based Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship. “Probably the biggest reason — I think it’s the loss of strong control over who runs in the primary.” She added: “Because the parties are weaker, when candidates run, they don’t anymore try to please the party and to stay in good graces with the party, because the party can’t give them as much as they used to in terms of helping of helping forward their political careers.”

It might seem like ancient history — I suppose because it is — but parties used to run their own shops.

Nominating conventions didn’t exist to fete the biggest vote-getter in presidential caucuses and primaries held in the states. Rather, until the post-World War II era, conventions were the primary, with party delegates voting amongst themselves to choose a White House standard bearer. And as it happened, these smoke-filled rooms picked some pretty good presidents. Even after Democrats and Republicans moved to popular primary elections, parties still exerted substantial control over campaign resources, a lever they used to effectively stiff-arm radical would-be candidates and root out politically problematic and narrow agendas before they could take hold.

In doing so, the two major parties nominated more candidates with broad appeal. These candidates, in turn, were more prone to offer policy platforms that, while paying some homage to the left-wing or right-wing base of their party — for instance, on the issue of abortion rights — generally existed somewhere within the 40-yard lines of American politics.

Surprise, surprise: Governing in Washington, while always cutthroat, was less partisan and more functional.

Several factors beyond the democratization of the presidential nominating process have driven the devolution of the Democratic and Republican parties. Some are the unintended consequences of well-intentioned political reforms designed to make elected officials more accountable to the voters; some are the result of societal changes and technological innovation well beyond the parties’ control.

To name a few: Campaign finance reform, enacted on a bipartisan basis in 2002, severely limited the parties’ control over resource allotment. Gerrymandering, around since the founding of the republic, is now aided by computerized mapping and produces intricately drawn congressional districts far more partisan than their predecessors. Social media and the Internet, technologies that reward anger and outrage, enable fringe politicians to reach wide audiences and raise money directly from voters, rather than through the party apparatus.

Steve Kornacki, author of “The Red and The Blue; The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism,” told me the advent of social media has chipped away at the power bases of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee while simultaneously fueling partisanship. “Over the last generation, turnout in elections is way up and split-ticket voting is way down,” said Kornacki, chief data analyst for NBC News.

“This has a lot to do with media and technology and how it has synced up with our very human tendency to think and behave tribally. We pick sides, silo ourselves off from each other, and receive constant reinforcement that we’re right and they’re wrong,” he added. “The DNC and the RNC benefit from this in some ways; it creates many new partisan Democrats and Republicans. But it’s also a phenomenon that’s much bigger than any party organization and they are powerless to shape it.”

I often remark that the Democratic and Republican parties have transformed into glorified ballot access organizations. Their vast infrastructures mean they have secured, and continue to maintain, ballot lines for their candidates in every state, municipality and U.S. territory in the country where contested elections — for the highest and lowliest offices in the land — are held. That’s not nothing. Being able to do that is a major barrier to entry for third parties.

But what else do our two major political parties exist to do? Answering that question is becoming increasingly difficult. Losing card-carrying members isn’t helping matters either, especially regarding dissatisfaction over partisanship. If party membership continues to dwindle, the partisans are going to be the only ones left.

David M. Drucker is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”

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The Park Grove Library in Cottage Grove will close later this month for a $13.5 million makeover and will reopen to the public in early 2027.

The majority of the existing building structure at 7900 Hemingway Ave. S. will remain, but the front entrance will be reconstructed to create a more usable and flexible layout, county officials say.

An architectural rendering of the new Washington County Park Grove Library interior in Cottage Grove. The redesigned library is expected to reopen in early 2027. (Courtesy of Washington County)

The new and improved library will feature increased access, better visibility and better parking — items that are necessary because the current building, built in 1984, is tucked into a neighborhood behind several multi-story apartment buildings. It will also be more energy efficient, and include more meeting and study rooms, a dedicated space for teens, a children’s area and other community-focused spaces, county officials say.

County officials have been working on the redesign project since early 2025 when a feasibility study and community engagement effort, led by Alliiance architects, were conducted.

The library will close at 5 p.m. Feb. 28.

A temporary library location at the Cottage Grove Service Center, 13000 Ravine Parkway S., will open March 2. Hours will be: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday and Wednesday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.

The temporary library will offer basic services such as getting a library card, holds pickup, a small browsing collection and access to public computers and printing. Library staff will offer regular story time sessions, book clubs, tax assistance and tech programs at the Service Center and out in the community.

For more information, go to WashCoLib.org/Events.

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The horrifying episode in which Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot generated and posted millions of sexualized images of real people, including women and children, has a clear lesson: It should be illegal to use anyone’s photograph to create a fake image intended to depict that person.

Last summer, Congress passed the Take It Down Act, which prohibits posting deep fakes that depict people engaged in intimate sexual acts. Now Congress should expand the act to cover any misappropriation of a person’s likeness.

This can be accomplished in a manner consistent with the First Amendment. There is a long-standing common-law right of individuals to control the commercial use of their image and to prevent others from using it for gain. That right should provide a basis for outlawing the kind of image appropriation that occurred on Grok.

It will be necessary to have exceptions for political commentary or satire. But fake images should not count as newsworthy for First Amendment purposes. Moreover, the benefits of protecting people from the misappropriation of their images outweighs the risks of chilling the lawful publication of news images.

What makes the Grok situation so immediately upsetting is that it permitted anyone to produce salacious images of anyone at any time. Widely available AI technology makes it easy to do so. It is also clear that market pressures alone will not suffice to stop the practice. Even if Grok has made changes that make it more difficult to produce such images, publicly available, open-source AI can, in principle, be used to achieve the same result.

This state of affairs can’t be right, and the law must find a way to protect against it. The violation is connected to privacy in the sense that it certainly feels like an invasion of privacy to be depicted naked in an image that looks like a photograph. There is also a common-law right of privacy that could serve as a basis for justifying a new law.

But the separate common-law right to control your own image and prevent its misappropriation is an even closer fit to the modern wrong. If I am in a bathing suit and someone takes a photograph of me, then perhaps it isn’t a violation of my privacy to post it. But if you take a photograph of me fully clothed and then transpose my face onto a picture of someone who is naked, that is literally a misappropriation of my face. So long as you’re doing that for your benefit, not for mine, you’ve infringed on my right to ownership of my image.

The right against the misappropriation of my image shouldn’t be limited to nude or otherwise sexualized images of me, however. Just as there is a common-law right against somebody taking my image without my consent and using it to promote their own product or otherwise make money, there should also be a legal right against somebody using my image without my consent for their own purposes. AI-generated images of made-up people would not be protected under this legal principle. The protection would, however, extend to an actually identifiable person — the person whose image was taken.

To ensure that free speech is protected under such a law, the statute should exclude constitutionally protected speech. Editing a news photograph in a way that doesn’t misrepresent the original image shouldn’t be illegal, because a ban might chill the editorial process.

The Supreme Court has also protected parodies under the First Amendment, treating them as exempt from intellectual property restrictions such as copyright law. Parody images based on photographs of real people should therefore also be protected, to the extent that they aren’t intended to mislead the viewer but merely to comment on public figures and matters of public concern. The law should allow you to make all the memes you want using images of any politician or other public figure. Similarly, cartoon figures would be fully protected. The law should be restricted to the appropriation of photographic images or to AI-generated images that are indistinguishable from photographs.

I am a strong defender of First Amendment rights. AI-generated words and images deserve the same protection as any other forms of speech or expression. But the First Amendment has never been understood to protect the misappropriation of one’s image by another. Your image is your property. And if you can’t stop that image from being taken without your consent and transformed into something you don’t want, you don’t really own it.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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