This coming June 17 marks the 103rd arrival of Father’s Day. I suppose I’ve celebrated it in some form every year of my life, but I still had to look up the date to figure out when it is. Father’s day isn’t really a thing. Not the way Mother’s Day is a thing; not even […]
Month: June 2012
June 4- June 8 This week, Cameron explains about the long history of complaining about the gloomy weather in Southern California. Guest poster and Cassie’s man Soren Wheeler took on the phrase “dumbing down” as it is routinely dispensed by scientists tired of science journalism: “The implication is that if you need those things to […]
I used to think the weather was something adults talked about because they were boring. And now that’s me, commiserating with neighbors about the state of our sky, which gave us a glorious, bluebird May and then rolled out a thick cloud carpet on the first day of June. June Gloom isn’t just a Southern […]
On the taxi ride there, I felt a little ill. The long, sleepless flight to Lima, a dodgy lunch that was coming back to haunt me, and the abrupt swerving and lurching of the taxi through the congested streets of the Peruvian capital—all seemed to be taking their toll. By the time I and my […]
In all my obsessive reading about combat sport – the ghost-written memoirs and swaggering comment threads – one concept has always stumped me. Time and again a story of a fight takes as its pivotal moment the breaking of a fighter’s will. Or take this account: “I was beating him up, but I don’t think […]
A couple of days ago I was sitting at work when my wife emailed me an article by Adam Ruben. He’s a scientist who writes a humor column for Science. This one was about science journalism. I thought: Hey, I’m a science journalist, I like funny things, should be good. But a few paragraphs in, […]
I first encountered lionfish on Carrie Bow Cay, a hurricane-battered scrap of an island 15 miles off the coast of Belize. The rotating crew of biologists on Carrie Bow work hard and play hard, and one popular form of play is lionfish hunting: spearing, cooking, and enthusiastically devouring these stripey fellows on the left. Lionfish […]
It was a usual week at LWON: questions and opinions shot off like bottle rockets, unexpectedly and in all directions. Virginia gets on the phone to interview neuroscientists and realizes that most of them are men. Then she gets on the phone about a hot new neuroscience and realizes that almost-most of her interviewees are […]
