Whatever Trees

There’s a quote I’ve seen attributed to Ram Dass about why we should turn people into trees. When we look at people (or ourselves), we judge. We compare. We criticize. But for trees, Ram Dass says, it’s different. “Some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, […]

Leading the Bedtime Rebellion

Yesterday at 8:23am, my husband texted me a link. No note, just a string of random letters and slashes and dots. I clicked and landed on a research article titled “Why don’t you go to bed on time?” The manuscript begins like this: “Most people do not get enough sleep on work days despite sleep’s […]

Baby Steps With Baby Words

Having a baby is a miracle. Everyone tells me so, so it must be true. It’s also an adventure – again, according to pretty much everybody. I’ve had a lot of adventures and spent years searching for miracles and I have to say, those words don’t really fit. It’s more like one long psychology experiment. […]

The Last Word

February 19-23, 2018 My g-g-uncle Norman experienced an early wilderness death by charismatic megafauna: eaten by a lion. Nevertheless, he was deemed to have died for King and Empire. The open secret of the lies of professional wrestling have been generalized into the political sphere, economics, and even scientific discourse, says Sally. Are you in […]

How We Broke up with Our Phones (Sort Of)

Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life was just published 10 days ago, but since we here at LWON are not confined by space or time, we can already tell you how her 30-day plan worked for us. Last spring, the two of us were […]

Guest Post: Ethnicity and Entrée in an Environmental Wasteland

Riau, Indonesia looks nothing like the white sand beaches, impenetrable rainforests, or volcanoes that tourists might typically associate with the country. Instead, palm oil plantations blanket the province’s hilly landscape. Thick black pipes outline the cramped, two-way roads that connect towns, pumping petrol from the ground. Rubber, acacia, or eucalyptus plantations begin when the palm […]

Last Days of the Dog

\Here, as this Year of the Dog begins, we are the deciders, choosing which day will be the last for our 15-year-old Korean Jindo, Waits. How does one know when it is time? Is his life still a good thing, to him, if he cannot easily rise to drink water, if he cannot control his […]

When life hands you fake news, make Kayfabe

What scientific concept would everyone be better off knowing? When the magazine Edge asked mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, he described the following: What rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous […]