And here we are enduring another wet blast of late summer’s hot breath, a last gasp before fall blows in. This imminent transition of seasons is always a thoughtful time for me, for many of us. Here’s how I was thinking about it a few years ago. Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new […]
Month: August 2026
This post came out a few years ago exploring anxiety and big, wild cats. At that point, there had been no deaths this century from mountain lions in Colorado where I live. New Year’s Day this year that statistic changed when a woman was attacked while alone on a hiking trail not far from the […]
Innovation is one of those abilities we used to think only humans possessed. But you’ve probably heard about the creative problem solving of New Caledonian crows who are able to build tools by bedding wires to fish food out of holes. Captive orcas have been observed chewing up the dead fish they are fed and […]
Baltimore in August: I was out on my early-morning walk, I don’t even know the temperature or humidity or feels-like combination, I’ve given up caring but all numbers were high, and I ran into a neighbor going the same way so we walked together for a bit. We were neither one of us built for […]
Two days after I moved with my family to the middle of Alaska I learned about the earthquakes. Every 15 minutes or so, monitoring stations in the state detect one. Most aren’t large, or even felt far beyond their epicenters. Some begin far out to sea and appear as barely more than a tiny spike […]
Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. This instalment originally appeared in August 2017. Nothing says interstellar travel like a hibernation pod. The heroes of the 2016 holiday blockbuster Passengers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, embark on a century-long journey to an planet […]
The first part of knowledge is often identifying, categorizing, and naming things. Humans are great at categorizing. But insistence on categories can be pathological, as with gender essentialism.
