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 […]
Month: July 2026
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 […]
This first ran September 24, 2015; since then I have stopped going to that coffeeshop and no longer see Larry and John, its chief scientists, and in fact I hardly remember what they looked like and the coffeeshop moved anyway. Time is an illusion, you say? not when so much stuff undeniably happens in it; […]
I’m so happy to see these guys year after year, so I’m celebrating them again here on LWON.I don’t know why this came out in “verse,” but here it is. I’m no poet, but I had fun regardless. And if you read it right, it really does scan! Upon my feeder yesterdayA cowbird male did […]
It’s summer, and I’ve been thinking of what poet Billy Collins called those, “forlorn chairs/though at one time it must have seemed/a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.” Even situated, as they usually are, to take in the view, it’s hard for those chairs to compete with the attention-grabbing distractions found on our […]
Jumping spiders are, I think, generally agreed to be the cutest spider. What makes an animal cute? Especially this representative of one of the most-feared animal groups, the spider? It’s fuzzy, like a teddy bear. It has big eyes, like a baby fox. It holds its pedipalps, those little things that stick out on either […]
