It was a sunny morning in Ton Sai Beach, Krabi, Thailand, 2003. The birds sang, the Andaman breeze blew its gentle perfumed air through the trees as I sat down to my morning banana pancake. Oblivious to the danger lurking above me. Watching. Waiting. My girlfriend and I were on a yearlong rock climbing trip and, as […]
Month: June 2016
Guys, this isn’t easy for me—please know that I’m quite conflicted over what I’m about to write. It goes against a big part of who I am. But judge me as you will. After years of hiding behind a gentle loves-all-animals exterior, it’s time for me to expose this personal inner truth. I hate […]
Owls. Little downy Ewoks. Fat and fusiform with big round eyes, legs feathered like miniature pilot pants in a stiff wind, perhaps a pair of droopy tuft ears. What is more trustworthy than droopy tuft ears? They appear as if they will take your deepest secrets to the grave. Perhaps this is why owls decorate […]
This is the first post in LWON‘s 4,729th annual Snark Week, a tribute to the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, filled with what we hope is an equal amount of truthfulness, credibility, and creativity. If you happen to notice we’ve written about sloths before, you may consider the following a timely and urgent update — less […]
Every year, some media entity terrifies the nation with a Shark Week. We here at LWON feel strongly that sharks, while terrifying, look scary and live in the ocean and therefore are pretty easy to recognize and avoid. Much harder to recognize and avoid are the innocent-looking, furry, feathery animals that under the pretense of […]
June 20 – 24, 2016 I start researching for a story and you know how that goes, rabbit hole, branching rabbit hole, another branch, another, and pretty soon I’m so far into Ballykilcline and Texas I’m never coming home. After a day in which we, for the first time in history, forgot to post anything, […]
I love that graduation speeches are now posted on the internet. Listening to them, the good ones, I can’t help but feel a little bit of that helium of opportunity and promise that I once had, in early summer, when I was the one who got to walk across the stage. One of my favorite […]
Last week in Berlin I saw an old friend. Well, several. My college friend Erika, a historian of science who is wrapping up a sabbatical there, and I visited the Museum für Naturkunde – the natural history museum. And there Erika put me in touch with another old friend: Knut the polar bear. Knut was […]
