I’ve been yammering on here at LWON for long enough now that it’s time for readers to get to know me a little more intimately. That means some introductions are in order. We’ll start strong with my buddy Gus, the Skittle-size hemangioma spooning my liver. As you can imagine, this bundle of excess blood vessels […]
Month: July 2026
My mom watering her flowers as a wildfire approaches I’m helping my mom evacuate, the air getting harder to breathe in this charred perfume, 23 square miles of conifers and oakbrush gone up in flames several miles away. Last report, the fire was about to crest the ridge at 10,000 feet where the front line […]
I’ve been following Liz Dunn’s happiness research for a while, and now she has co-written a new book, Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species (Penguin Random House), about how joy could be the missing weapon in our fight against climate change. Here we sit down for a Q&A about her […]
Three years ago I wrote a post about boundary conditions, those irrevocabilities that set limits on our lives. (You don’t like having limits? you want to negotiate limits? too bad. Boundary conditions like uncertainty and change, for instance, you want security? too bad; you want to make plans? too bad. Or old age, too bad; […]
In the Egyptian wing of the Brooklyn Museum my young son stands before a beautiful coffin containing the body of woman named Gautseshenu. Her name means “bouquet of lotuses,” though neither of us can pronounce it. After a couple bumbling tries we stop, me out of embarrassment and him because her name is not the […]
Our Roberta wrote a book! Roberta Kwok wrote for The Last Word on Nothing for several years — and once a Person of LWON, always a Person of LWON. Her first book, Lost in Curiosity, comes out on July 21. It’s filled with stories of the ups and downs of astronomers, physicists, frog biologists, and […]
The best acronym, in this our golden age of acronyms, is TIL, for Today I Learned. I love it. People use #TIL as a hashtag on social media, but not to show off. It doesn’t mean “I know something you don’t know, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah.” It means here’s something I just learned, and it’s delightful, and I’d […]
Jumping spiders can see as well as house cats — despite being less than 10mm long in most cases. I find this astounding, but people almost never seem as impressed as I think they should be when I tell them this. Perhaps they don’t believe it could be true. It is, though. Scientists have measured […]
