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The Last Word On Nothing

"Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

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Laura Helmuth

What’s That Quote?

Science is first of all about discovery (the first word on everything). But the more science knows, the more it realizes what it doesn’t know (the last word on nothing). Curiosity and humility: the human condition.

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A rotation of images courtesy of the excellent Biodiversity Heritage Library and the superb Public Domain Review. We’ll let you know what each image is as soon as we get the time and inclination.

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The writing on this blog belongs to the person who wrote it and should not be re-published without explicit permission of the author. Thank you!

The header images courtesy of the astounding Public Domain Review https://publicdomainreview.org/about/ and the equally splendid Biodiversity Heritage Library https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

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Who’s Up Next?

4/7 Eric

4/9 Cassandra

4/11 Sarah

Cameron Walker just published an unexpected book called How To Capture Carbon: Stories that is, according to our Richard Panek, quirky, witty, whipsmart, “insightful, sometimes mischievously so, and somehow altogether uncategorizable.”

Frequent Guest-Poster of LWON, Sarah DeWeerdt, won an Excellence in Science Journalism prize from the National Academies for 3 stories on 3 very different subject.

Best American and Nature Writing of 2024 is just out, and includes (why wouldn’t it) stories by Ben Goldfarb (The City of Glass) and ex-Person of LWON Emma Marris (The Sea Eagles that Returned to Mull).

Richard Panek, ex-Person of LWON and ongoing Friend, has just published The Pillars of Creation, about the astonishing JWST and how it got started and why and where it fits in our minds’ comprehension of It All.

Heather Pringle, Founder of LWON, just published The Northwomen with Penguin Random House. It’s about what the archeological record has finally gotten around to saying about Viking women. You would not want a Viking woman as an enemy.

Becky Boyle’s Our Moon, published by Penguin Random House, takes the moon personally and not everybody can get away with that. The book was the lead review of the NY Times Book Review. AND it has been longlisted for the National Book Award. AND it’s on the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 list — all of which is just stellar! Ok, lunar!

Nell Greenfieldboyce, Friend of LWON, just published Transient and Strange with W.W. Norton. It’s a book of startling science-adjacent essays, and not everybody can get away with that either. One essay began life as an LWON post about a spider at her window.

Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings, with Norton Press, is about his preoccupation — other than beavers — with the ecology of roadkill. The book is on 2023’s year-end-best lists of the New York Times, Kirkus, Science News, the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards. And in 2024, it won the Sierra Club’s Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing.

Cameron Walker’s new book, National Monuments of the USA, is for kids, and writing honestly about national monuments is a harder than you’d think.

Sally Adee’s new book, We Are Electric, published by Hachette Press, was glowed upon in a New York Times review which featured the phrase, “the long grass of some mightily weird modern research.”

Craig Child’s newest book is Tracing Time, published by Torrey House Press, about the rock art on his home Colorado Plateau.

One advantage of writing for free for LWON is that you can write about things that have triggered books or have fallen out of their research. So: Sarah’s seabirds, Sally’s bioelectricity, Craig’s rock art, Ben’s roadkill.