There’s no crying in baseball. There’s no crying at the gym, either. Yet there I was by the slant board with tears streaming down my face. I am an ugly crier. Worse, once I start I cannot stop. My face was turned to the wall, so my instructor hadn’t yet seen the tears. “You’re overthinking […]
Month: July 2018
I’ve been a bit of a Facebook addict for years. The pictures of pets! The interesting articles! But, when stressful things are happening in the world, I find that Facebook mostly exists for me to soak up everyone else’s panic about current events, like a human anxiety sponge. During a particularly stressful week last month, […]
I wrote this last year after a story I wrote for Nature. As the axolotl is inches toward extinction in the wild, along with so many creatures these days, it’s worth it to remember what makes them so cool. Last month I published a story in Nature about the sad story of the axolotl. It’s […]
This summer, I decided not to cut the grass in my backyard. I’ve long argued for letting a little more wildness into our gardens, but the cult of the lawn is a powerful cultural force and for years I, like most of us, have conformed and kept the back lawn mown. Ideally, I’d some day […]
July 2 – 6, 2018 I start the week with a bad thought: the part of your mind that’s the general contractor, the project manager, the executive? It’s good at making decisions, not so good at knowing when the poor idiot carrying them out is splatted on the ground weeping. On a stormy night, Jessa […]
We’ve been living in a tinderbox, precipitation at an all-time low, summer temperatures unusually high, snowpack paltry. The ground feels as if it’ll ignite just from looking at it. A few days ago a blaze started near Basalt, Colorado, a couple rivers east of where I live, forcing rapid evacuations. It started from tracer bullets […]
Even if you develop hives at the sight of the words “bitcoin” and “blockchain”, you probably couldn’t help noticing the shouty news the past week. Bitcoin is down! Bitcoin is slightly up! Way down! Little bit up again. As LWON went to press, Bitcoin was either on the verge of another runaway valuation that would climb […]
I recently read a story that truly resonated with me. I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore, by Dan Nosowitz at New York Magazine was both depressing and eerily accurate, as I too had typed in “nytimes.com” earlier that day looking for something to read or do online. Over the past few weeks, […]
