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Saturday is the winter solstice. Make the most of the shortest day of the year
People soak up the sun on deck chairs in the Allgäu region of southern Germany in 2020. Saturday is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
Benjamin Liss/dpa/AFP via Getty Images
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Benjamin Liss/dpa/AFP via Getty Images
Saturday is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s not only the shortest day of the year, but the official arrival of astronomical winter.
“At 4:20 a.m. EST, the solstice marks the beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemisphere,” NASA says on its website.
That means from now until the end of June, each day will get a little bit longer — and brighter (no matter what any famous animal prognosticators may predict).
In the meantime, there’s plenty to cherish during the cold season, and we’re not just talking about the December holidays.
Here are some ideas for how to celebrate the solstice and welcome winter:
Try out traditions from around the world
The winter solstice has long symbolized a time of renewal and ritual for people all over the world, as NPR has reported.
In Iran and many Central Asian countries, people gather to eat (especially red fruits like pomegranates and watermelons), drink and read poetry through the night. Some Japanese traditions include taking a hot bath with the citrus fruit yuzu and eating foods that contain the “n” sound (like udon) for good luck.
To learn more about winter solstice celebrations from both hemispheres, click here.
Stream the sunrise at Stonehenge
Each December and June, visitors flock to the ancient monument in England to celebrate the solstice.
The rock formation was built to align with the sun on those days, making for a dramatic view. On the winter solstice, the sun sets to the southwest of the stone circle (as opposed to the summer solstice, when the sun’s first rays shine into the heart of the monument).
The site allows entry — free of charge — for several hours on Saturday morning. If you can’t make the trip in person, you can catch a free livestream of the sunrise on the English Heritage YouTube and Facebook pages. It’s best suited for night owls or early birds, since it starts around 2:30 a.m. ET.
Enjoy the best of the Paul Winter Consort’s solstice concerts
Fittingly named saxophone player Paul Winter has been ushering in the winter solstice with a special concert for decades.
Since 1980, the Grammy winner and a slew of special guests have gathered in New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine to mark the occasion with music and dance. The event has found new homes since the COVID-19 pandemic, this year touring 10 acoustic venues throughout New England.
The sun rises over a snow-covered landscape in Denderhoutem, Belgium.
Hans Vandendriessche/BELGA/AFP via Getty Images
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Hans Vandendriessche/BELGA/AFP via Getty Images
NPR’s broadcast of Winter’s concerts has become a beloved seasonal tradition in itself. Last year, Winter combed through the archives and picked out his favorite moments from four decades of solstice celebrations. You can listen to them here.
Read The Shortest Day and hear an interview with its award-winning author
Susan Cooper’s children’s book The Shortest Day, released in 2019, is a celebration of light returning after the winter solstice.
The text of the book is actually a poem she wrote in the 1970s for The Christmas Revels (an annual celebration of the solstice), and it has been read at such events for more than four decades. Cooper, herself a Newbery Medal winner, partnered with Caldecott-honor illustrator Carson Ellis to bring its colorful imagery and wintry atmospherics to life.
Read or listen to NPR’s story on the beautiful book, and hear snippets of Cooper reading it out loud.
Prepare to do some “wintering”
Several recent works offer sage advice on how to “winter” — which essentially means embracing the season, not just weathering it.
This year, health psychologist Kari Leibowitz published How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days. It examines how people in places with extreme winters — from Scandinavia to northern Japan — have positive attitudes about the season, and the book offers practical tips for those who want a warmer outlook.
As Leibowitz told NPR, those tips include bundling up to reclaim a summer activity in the winter (like a beach barbecue or park picnic), making a list of winter things you look forward to and trading your home’s “big light” for cozier candles and lamps.
Another helpful manual is Katherine May’s 2020 book, Wintering. The English author acknowledges that winter can be a painful and isolating time — but also one of transformation. Her book, which involved traveling to far-flung, freezing destinations, explores how to confront the season head-on.
“Every time we winter, we develop a new knowledge about how to go back into the world,” May told Morning Edition that year. “We learn about our tastes and preferences. We learn about what makes us happy.”
The sun shines between snow-covered branches at the Hareskoven forested area near Copenhagen, Denmark.
Liselotte Sabroe/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
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Liselotte Sabroe/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
Cozy up with the year’s best books, shows and films
With winter weather closing in, it’s a great time to pick out your next entertainment obsession, from a TV series to binge with your family to an album you can play on loop while defrosting in the car.
NPR has you covered with recommendations in every category, thanks to staff members who consumed culture in every possible form all year long. They’ve put together a complete guide to the best of 2024.
NPR’s annual book recommendations engine is back with over 350 new titles (plus all of those from years past, going back over a decade). Critics compiled their favorite shows and movies of the year — searchable by both genre and where to watch it.
NPR Music has pulled together a few lists of its own, including the 124 best songs and 50 best albums of the year. Plus, check out NPR’s favorite games of the year, sortable by platform and genre.
Take care of yourself
Maybe darker days are making you crave better sleep or have you feeling stuck in a rut. Perhaps you’re looking for tips on protecting your home from winter weather, your car from icy roads and your family from COVID-19. You could be curious about the benefits of cold plunging or how to dress for a winter workout.
Enter NPR’s Life Kit, with expert advice for all sorts of physical and mental health topics. Whether you’re looking to get a head start on your New Year’s resolutions or just taking winter day by day, here are some resources that can help:
A version of this story originally published in 2021.
A Waymo robotaxi drives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood this week.
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Heather Diehl/Getty Images
Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It’s the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.
The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo’s systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.
Waymo’s cars, equipped with an array of cameras, microphones and other sensors to monitor passengers and other nearby vehicles, are becoming more common in cities across the United States. Experts say the detention of the two teens in San Mateo highlights a potential — but not inevitable — trade-off between privacy and convenience. It also questions the extent to which companies similar to Waymo are required to hand over private data, including audio and video of passengers, in situations where a crime is suspected.
NPR reached out to Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for comment on the details of the San Mateo incident and how the company responded, but did not hear back. But on its website, the company says that as many as 29 cameras in its autonomous cars provide an all-around view and “are designed with high dynamic range and thermal stability, to see in both daylight and low-light conditions, and tackle more complex environments.”
“There already exist laws that govern duty to report or even duty to protect” for carriers such as Waymo, according to Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “The privacy problems arise when and if driverless carrier companies used such laws or ethical obligations as a pretext for blanket, indiscriminate accumulation of identifiable data for unspecified future purposes.”
That includes not just monitoring people inside the cars, but outside too. Take, for example, a hit-and-run investigation last year in Los Angeles. Media reported that the police inquiry was aided by video captured by a Waymo taxi that had a clear view of the crime. Critics suggested at the time that authorities were using the company’s vehicles as a mobile surveillance platform. And during 2025 protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, demonstrators vandalized Waymos, apparently angry that video recorded by the vehicles could be used by police, although there is no evidence that happened.
In a transparency report, Google says it received nearly 290,000 requests from governments worldwide in the first six months of 2025 for disclosure of user information across all its platforms, including Waymo. The company says that in more than 80% of the requests in those six months, some information was disclosed. “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all,” the company says.
In an email to NPR, San Mateo Police Department spokesperson Jeanine Luna said that detaining the teens in the Waymo on Monday was “wholly appropriate” under the circumstances. “We received the call of a ‘firearm’ being shot from a moving vehicle,” she said. “Furthermore, the occupants were described as being possibly ‘intoxicated.’” she said.
“Being that the vehicle was disabled (the occupants had every right to exit the vehicle before police arrival, but they did not), a high-risk traffic stop was conducted to ensure the safety of all involved,” Luna added. “They were not arrested and were released to their parents, however, potential charges are still pending dependent on what the video from inside the vehicle shows.”
Autonomous taxis represent an ethical gray area
Robotaxis began to roll out across the U.S. in December 2018, when Waymo launched in Phoenix. These services have been used for less than a decade — so the norms surrounding them aren’t settled, experts agree.
The Facebook post may make Waymo passengers wonder what triggers a police intervention, says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University. She has used Waymo’s driverless taxis and says ethically, the privacy issues surrounding them sit in a gray area. “There’s something about being in a car without another person that makes you think it’s private.”
“With all these recording devices, we don’t see them, [and] they’re not these obvious things being stuck in our faces,” Raicu adds.
That brings up a key issue: informed consent, Acquisti says.
“It is not clear the extent to which passengers … are reminded that when they step into the car, that they are being monitored, and most likely they are not told in its entirety how the data will be used,” he says.
Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and privacy expert and professor at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, believes that Waymo does have a compelling interest in protecting its vehicles. He compares monitoring a robotaxi via cameras to a human taxi driver keeping an eye on passengers in the rearview mirror.
“Maybe the driverless car comes back … and it has all of its cushions slashed, and it’s like, ‘Who the hell did that? Let’s go and look at the tape,’” Schneier suggests. “You can’t have sex in the back of a taxi, right? Someone would say, ‘Stop it.’”
He concludes that some supervision makes sense. In an Uber rideshare, he notes, “most of the time there’s a camera recording the back seat.” (Uber says on its website that it allows drivers to install such cameras for the purpose of “fulfilling transportation services.”)
Waymo robotaxis, while a fairly common sight in the San Francisco Bay Area, are still a novelty in much of the country. And many people are hesitant to ride in one, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. The survey found that only 5% of Americans had ever ridden in a driverless car. Meanwhile, 71% of those polled said they would feel uncomfortable in one, with only 7% saying they would be “extremely or very comfortable” riding in one.
For that reason, experts who spoke with NPR said they were optimistic that it’s not too late to shift gears on privacy norms and policies surrounding these vehicles.
Acquisti doesn’t see why privacy measures can’t be built into driverless vehicles.
“I would immediately challenge the notion that people have to be monitored,” he says, noting that privacy-preserving technologies exist and can be installed.
“Driverless cars are coming, but they don’t have to come in this particular incarnation,” Raicu says. “They’re still being designed and redesigned. It’s early days.”
Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.
“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
“It is irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a Thursday statement. “This move undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”
The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.
It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.
Reuters contributed reporting
Former U.S. Olympian David Hearn (left) walks with his attorney Norman Eisen to speak to reporters and protesters gathered after his arraignment at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
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Former U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn pleaded not guilty to damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in D.C. Superior Court Thursday morning.
Federal prosecutors charged Hearn with a single count of destruction of property causing more than $1,000 in damage to the pool.
Hearn has previously claimed, which his attorneys repeated during a short press conference outside the court, that he simply touched the water in the pool out of curiosity.
The Trump administration had just completed a $14 million renovation of the pool.
But shortly after the work finished, peeling paint and algae gathered in the water. The remodel has been largely criticized as a massive failure and waste of taxpayer dollars.
Superior Court Judge Carmen McLean released Hearn on his own recognizance. His next hearing is scheduled for Aug. 5.
Norm Eisen, one of Hearn’s attorneys, spoke to reporters outside of court following the hearing. He said the administration is using Hearn as a “scapegoat … for their own failures.”
“It is not a crime to touch the reflecting pool, to touch water in the United States of America,” he said.
Prosecutors say there is a host of evidence against Hearn.
This is a developing story.
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