In caves and rock walls of the southern Utah desert, pictographs have been painted, added to the backs of clamshell-shaped sandstone enclosures. Many are noted to have acoustic properties, meaning these ancient, Indigenous images seem to be correlated with the way sound reflects around them. I’ve spoken in a normal voice back and forth from […]
Month: November 2017
I never meant for this to happen. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest from arid Colorado three years ago, I was one of those people who insisted on horizons. The town where I was born is a place where the foothills of the Rockies stand like a cliffy coastline overlooking a dry sea of […]
There is no roadmap for confronting a neighbor in the grocery store about a sexual assault that happened twenty years ago. Cassie, on Monday. On a happier note, we’ve got a new Person of LWON. Rebecca Boyle sees her bare-branched pin oak and thinks asteroids. Apart from humans, maybe, trees are the best form of life […]
Years ago, talking about the persistent rumor that the Hubble Space Telescope was an off-the-shelf spy satellite retrofitted for astronomy*, I told a NASA employee that I was pretty sure academic astronomers were culturally anti-military and they wouldn’t be crossing lines and dealing with spies or the defense department. The NASA employee looked at me […]
Recently I was looking for a distraction-free writing system. I knew I had heard about many. But they all seemed to have simple, hard to remember names. (A related complaint: companies that name themselves words like “medium” so that when you’re trying to figure out how to do something you cannot search “medium format image” […]
This post ran back in June 2016 after the shooting in the Orlando nightclub. I’m running it again because, sadly, it is as relevant as ever. The atrocities keep coming, and as a writer I continue to feel unsure of how to handle them. (Here’s what’s happened since then.) ———— I’ve been working on a […]
A small raptor alighted for a few minutes yesterday on the top of a tree in my yard. The bird perched up in the crown, on branches that have been bare for a few weeks. The tree is a pin oak, whose health was questionable when we moved to this house in the spring, yet […]
I am delighted to introduce, Rebecca Boyle, a supremely talented independent journalist and the newest person of LWON. Becky got her start as a newspaper reporter covering state and local politics. But then she returned to her first love: space. Her abiding love for astronomy drives her outside on frosty winter nights even though she […]
