Apparently we’re feminine/ist this week, or so far Emma and I are. I want to argue about the Finkbeiner Test. The test began with a heroic vow: I would write a profile of a woman scientist without the clichés that litter these profiles. The test took off when Christie wrote a post about my post […]
September 11 – 15, 2017 Guest Rebecca Boyle had been studying up, anticipating the eclipse for months. On the day of, she suddenly thinks, “What if it turns out to be boring?” She needn’t have worried. (And this might be the place to add: an older astronomer who’s seen everything the sky has to offer, […]
This first ran March 9, 2011. I haven’t changed my mind. Crows take care of each other, talk constantly, have their enemies lists, are smart, are wicked, and remind me a lot of the rest of us.“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a […]
The People of LWON apparently have several preoccupations in common (Bugs, Love; Bugs, Hate) and one of them is corvids, the family of crows and ravens. In case you need to be convinced of the charm, deplorability, and urgent importance of corvids, we collect them all into one week, this week, beginning today, right now.
August 14 – 18, 2017 Jenny watches the married, loving mourning doves. Then Jenny’s all-but-feral dog kills the dove wife. The dove husband perches above her grave and calls and calls, no answer. So then what? Well what do you think. And with Erik’s post, LWON begins Eclipse Week. Erik polls the ancient Vikings, Maya, […]
So, LWON is eclipsing, on into next week. And if the internet is to be believed, half the country will be pulled north and the other half south and they’ll converge in the middle, on the path of totality. It’s charming, how a population that normally lives at arm’s length from earthly reality — milk […]
Ann: Please meet Adam Rogers. He wrote a story about DARPA looking for solutions to the credibility problems of social science, only what I’m calling “solutions to credibility problems,” he called bullshit detection. First, social science’s credibility problems. Here’s the way I said it in 2015: Start with any question involving human behavior or motivation and […]
July 31 – August 4, 2017 Jessa’s on a trip that’s so far out in the back of beyond that it needs a guide. The guide doesn’t show. But nobody quits. Michelle finds a splendid metaphor for surviving ridiculously unpleasant situations: imitate the reindeer and assume Arctic resignation. I redux the struggles that Helen and […]