It was a Wednesday morning, the last day in May. I’d been at the emergency room until the wee hours with a loved one and I needed to be asleep, but my brain had other plans. Me: how about sleep? Brain: Alternative proposal: how about obsessing over your problems, such as this loved one who […]
Month: June 2023
If you have been at LWON for a while, you might have noticed that I post this one every year–because somehow, once again, it is June. And once again, it is gloomy. But things have been extra-cloudy this year, and people who don’t live in California have noticed! I mean, the Washington Post was even […]
One enthralling aspect of writing a book about roads and nature is that the world suddenly blossoms with odd interactions and novel ecosystems. Once you’re attuned to how our transportation infrastructure alters landscapes, every walk or drive becomes an occasion to observe some strange geo/hydro/ecological dynamic. To wit: I’m fascinated by roads as concentrators of […]
First snowmelt, and a month of dry, but the rain finally comes, and everything is flowers, for a time.
For the last two years I’ve been working on a book about dogs. Dog intelligence, in particular. When I started on it, I kind of wondered what I could possibly say that hasn’t been said. I mean, there are A LOT of dog books out there already, many of them dealing with cognition at least […]
A version of this essay originally appeared June 15, 2012, as part of this site’s Father’s Day series. In the final paragraph I’ve updated one temporal reference (“two weeks ago yesterday” to “May 31, 2012”) and added one recent personal development. “My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.” The line has always […]
The other day, I had to take everything off a bookshelf I replaced, and I had to move one of my oldest possessions: A beautiful, unkempt houseplant of indeterminate background. It has been on a high shelf most of the time I’ve had it, and even before that. My husband rescued it from the upper […]
This is Part 2 of my interview with Jennifer Lunden, author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. You can read Part 1 here. Kate: The main thing I took away from your early advice to me about book writing was “buy yourself […]
