It is Thing Appreciation Week at LWON, where we bring you the Greatest Hits of our previous posts about inanimate objects. Anne Sasso wrote this post in January of last year celebrating her pocket calculator, which has stood by her for 40 years while planned obsolescence ate all of her other devices — and their replacements. […]
Month: July 2016
This week LWON reminds you of all the mundane, unimpressive, uncelebrated things that are nevertheless worth celebrating. The advice of early mentors often has unexpected weight; we keep following it long after we’ve grown up and become mentors ourselves. Helen’s first mentor in journalism, the excellent Joanne Silberner, gave her advice about the complex and […]
This week at LWON we’re digging into the archives to celebrate the uncelebrated: inanimate objects. Many of them aren’t very impressive inanimate objects. And yet we love them. In December 2014 Nell Greenfieldboyce explained her obsession with paper clips. If you’ve ever worried about the feelings of an inanimate object, or thought about how amazing […]
This week at LWON we’re digging into the archives to celebrate the uncelebrated: inanimate objects. Many of them aren’t very impressive inanimate objects. And yet we love them. I was inspired to propose this week of reruns by a piece former LWONer Tom Hayden wrote back in 2011 about the various functional, non-fancy things he […]
July 11 – 15, 2016 Jessa updates a post about the Berger Inquiry, the time that the Canadian government actually asked the people who were here first what they wanted to do with the land that belonged to them in the first place. Rose’s backyard in Brooklyn is full of squirrels fighting, not just the […]
If you read my post earlier this week, you’ll know that I did this fantastic science fair project back in the 7th grade. In fact, when it comes to science, I might have peaked in middle school—which is pretty sad. But I peaked in a big way with that bone-growing experiment. Please go back and […]
In this month’s issue of National Geographic, I lay out a simple question. How many great white sharks are there on Earth? It seems simple enough – we’ve found some 3,500 planets outside our solar system and 400,000 species of beetles on Earth. This is the modern world of crowdsourcing and big data. We can […]
I remember my 7th grade science fair project pretty clearly. You may think you aren’t interested in what it was, but you should be—because it was fabulous. It was truly unique. I didn’t grow plants under different colored lights and I didn’t build a lame volcano using paper maché and some sticky baking soda and Sprite mixture (or whatever). […]
