Very occasionally, a post we write here is, unbeknownst to us, incomplete. It will only be concluded by our readers, who finish the job in the comments section. On August 28, 2015, I posed a mystery in the form of a very old document, and I thought I had more or less solved that riddle […]
Month: March 2020
For the love of trees and their leafy kin, and with Australia’s horrendous fires on my mind, here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago about the surprising capabilities of plants that make their burning especially sad. Meanwhile, researchers continue to uncover remarkable details about plants’ lives, as in this report about their (almost […]
Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, slightly fixed up. A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human in […]
A partially fictionalized diary of antvasion Sept. 15 Line of small black ants across the kitchen floor. Origin and destination unclear. Some have abdomens cocked upward at a jaunty angle, like ant hotrods. This makes them look more aggressive and hooligany somehow. Gone before noon, as if they had never been. Sept. 16 (Forget about […]
Please welcome Jane C. Hu, a talented journalist whose voicy, insightful writing you may already know from her work in Slate’s Future Tense. Or maybe you have taken her science writing class at the University of Washington. If not, I dare you to read her cover story in the February issue of High Country News […]
There’s a certain jolt that accompanies a good story idea. For me, it’s a physical sensation, as if I can feel my brain clicking all the right pieces into place. In a fleeting instant, I see the whole thing: the plot, the characters, the conflict, the brilliant overarching themes that really say something about our […]
Freeman Dyson’s death is a little like the death of the last member of a rare species, only he didn’t even belong to a species, he was a one-off individual, he was singular. The point is, the world is a less interesting place now. I wrote two posts about him; one was about his astonishingly […]
