I fell in love in Japan. He was older, and so very tall. There was a glow about him, warm as sunshine. I could have sat and watched him for hours. Even though we didn’t have that much time together, I knew I would never forget him. He was so present, so grounded. Resilient after […]
Month: December 2019
We’ve reached the end of another trip around the sun, which means Twitter is chockablock with year-end round-ups — here’s what I wrote, read, accomplished, etcetera — a phenomenon that generally leaves me feeling like a feckless, uncultured slacker. This December, though, I’ve resolved to celebrate my experiences rather than wallow in retrospective regret. For […]
If there’s any animal that could use a new PR agency, it’s got to be the electric eel. I mean, think about it – what other animal doesn’t even have its own correct name? You’ve probably heard that an electric “eel” is no eel at all but rather a fish (a knifefish, to be exact). From this […]
When LWONers aren’t writing LWON posts for your edification and pleasure, some of them are writing books. Excuse our self promotion, but we think our books are pretty good, and as it is the holiday season, we wanted to make sure our dear readers are aware of the latest ones. See below for the books […]
You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it. “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its […]
At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona — towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen […]
Some things are sisters, if you know how to look at them like a wildfire sun and a new penny like snowy boughs and salamander feet
A few months ago, I visited the Pasteur Institute, a research center in Paris dedicated to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. The trip included a tour of the apartment and crypt of Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French chemist and microbiologist who developed vaccines against rabies and anthrax. My favorite part of the […]
