I am honored to introduce a new Person of LWON, Laura Helmuth, who probably doesn’t need introducing at all, given that she has done everything (editing mostly, but also editing-in-chief and giving encouraging talks and getting a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and winning awards and being on every science writing committee and institution known to […]
Month: May 2025
This is Diego. He is a Phidippus johnsoni jumping spider, and he lives on a jade plant in my front yard. There are several spiders of this species that can be found on the jade plant on any given day, but I know when it’s Diego I’ve spotted. Adult males of this species are around […]
It’s my pleasure to welcome Betsy Mason as the newest person of LWON. Betsy is an award-winning freelance science journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a senior editor at Wired for many years, and she has won a lot of accolades, including the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman award for breaking […]
When I pull into the boat ramp parking lot, it’s just after midnight. It should be deserted. Nobody goes night boating. But my headlights illuminate a red sedan parked hood to the woods. I can’t tell if it’s occupied. The windows are dark. My brain tries to make it make sense. You can’t pull a […]
One morning a few years ago, I woke to find I had lost most of the hearing in my left ear. In place of my usual acoustic environment was a high electronic ringing—eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—as if a giant TV had been left on mute. Me being me, I assumed the issue would work itself out, but when […]
I have never fallen into quicksand, but like most people, I have been anxious about it at least several times in my life. You have too, right? It’s a real thing — you can be sucked down into the soft liquefied Earth unexpectedly, on hikes or on random walks. One of my friends fell into […]
This first ran January 3, 2019. I don’t know if Emily ever bought disability insurance or not. — Ed. “This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, […]
