Last spring, I wrote a story about the origin and evolution of “endling,” a word used to describe the sole surviving member of a species. Endling was coined in the mid-1990s by Robert Webster, a Georgia doctor who, during his work at a convalescent center, realized that there was no precise English word for a […]
Month: October 2017
Newbie journalists love to ask where seasoned journalists find their story ideas. I’ll tell you where I find mine: Editors. They have really good ideas and sometimes they’ll just hand them to you. That’s called an assignment, and I take a lot of them. Unfortunately, LWON doesn’t give assignments. So when you sign up for […]
These early fall days have been especially musical here, in my house under the trees. The mornings ding and clink and the afternoons ping and donk and the nights are broken up by knocks, clangs, and cymbal crashes that startle me awake. (Part of my roof is metal.) It’s the acorns falling, but in a […]
I’ve always had trouble with lunches at the office. No matter what I took from home, it was almost always not that good. Reheated leftovers? I wanted more. Peanut butter and jelly? Just sad. At my current job, if left to my own devices, I would go to the pizza place across the street every […]
Greetings, Gentle LWON Readers, Here’s what happened this week on your favorite science blog: Guest blogger Elizabeth Svoboda made us a little woozy (in a good way) in her post about seasickness. In her essay she dives into the psychology of her own gut-wrenching experiences. Then Rose rolled her eyes at the shock many men […]
This post originally ran March 31, 2015. I knew what I expected from the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City: amusement. I go to a lot of museums, and in my experience, privately-run museums based on one person’s obsession are always quirky and often pretty fun. This museum was founded by a guy and his […]
This post first ran on March 13, 2015. On September 27, 1937, Susie Mae DeLoach caught her leg on a strip of barbed wire. The wound festered, and the infection spread, eventually reaching her heart. None of the remedies DeLoach’s doctor recommended seemed to have any effect. And by the time her family called Dr. Johnston […]
Last week I had a couple of snakebit days, the kind that are my fault entirely – like leaving (almost) the house with no makeup and no shoes. On one of these days I took a package to an UPS store, found out I would pay $50 to send a $50 present, decided what the […]
