Here in Washington, D.C., we love our cherry trees. The cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin, near the Jefferson Memorial, get all the attention. And they deserve it–they’re lovely. This year, peak bloom was an elusive creature. February was so unseasonably warm that the Park Service predicted peak bloom would come March 14 or 15, one of […]
Month: April 2017
I have a bit of a thing about whales. The shelf above my desk at home is full of whale art, and a National Geographic whale poster hangs in a frame above that. Along with that, I have a thing about Moby Dick, which is a book about whales. So when it was time for […]
[UPDATE: see links below* for the titles of predatory journals] In honor of the posts of Michelle Nijhuis and Christie Aschwanden, too many posts to link to, about the detection, prevention, and treatment of bullshit. I hate being lied to. I purely hate it. I hate it with a cold, hard hate. I understand that […]
As human civilization becomes ever more technologically complex, the average competence of each person declines. When a society operates using a suite of technologies that a single adult can learn in his or her lifetime—building a house from scratch, farming, spinning cotton, making medicines, having babies, hunting, fishing, singing and dancing—then it is possible to […]
In honor of Helen Fields’s beloved series about the bugs she comes across in her daily life [see Fields, H. “Bugs on my Window,” LWON (June 24, 2015)], I’d like to present a semi-related post: Bugs (or Other Things) that my Dogs Probably Regurgitated As a writer and a “scientist” (I studied Conservation Biology, which […]
Margo Schulz recalls a time from her childhood when large black snowflakes drifted down from the sky. She remembers those warm summer days, outside with her sister hanging laundry to dry. They made a game of reaching up and catching the blackened flakes mid-air. They were burnt pieces of paper: half a birth certificate, part […]
March 27 – 31, 2017 One of LWON’s preoccupations is with the prevention, detection, and abolition of bullshit. Christie, who often writes about controversies, gets angry emails which she understands and which suggest to her bullshit’s cause. Cassie’s friend, Neda, has lots of hair which she wears in a bun which, every time she goes […]
