I’ve known Mike Lemonick for several thousand years, ever since he assigned me to write a news story. And I was then, as I still am, congenitally unable to write news stories. All I remember is that I blew the news story and Mike had to completely rewrite it. I don’t remember the story, I […]
January 27 – February 3, 2017 Helen, who also sings and writes, set out on a mission to draw every day in hopes that she’d get better. After a year of this, she reports on the state of her art. I personally think she should leave a couple things for the rest of us to […]
That’s a screen shot of the Capital Weather Gang’s excited tweet. I’d just finished explaining to our own Erik Vance what a derecho was — he said it meant “straight ahead” and was a dumb name for a weather phenomenon — and that the mid-Atlantic, which he was then visiting, wouldn’t be getting the derecho […]
A couple of Harvard astronomers just wrote an essay in a new journal called Nature Astronomy. That’s not the most riveting opening sentence you’ve ever read; I apologize. But the essay was odd, a kind of rumination-with-examples about how things in astronomy on vastly different scales nevertheless have similar structures. That is, electrons orbit atomic […]
I wish I could remember – but I can’t – the woman who told me a story about how she and other women in her profession had regular lunches, casually, unofficially, no agenda. Was she a lawyer? A writer? An astronomer? Just don’t remember. The thing I’m sure about is that the point was not […]
If you know a non-English European language, you probably know that “history” and “story” are often the same word. I don’t know how this happened but it seems deeply wrong. I was outraged. At the least, it seems to undermine the authority and credibility that history claims, as opposed to the making-shit-up that stories do. […]
Last Wednesday, December 21, Sidney Drell died. I can’t imagine anyone called him anything except “Sid.” He was 90. He was a particle physicist who for a while was deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator. He had a persistent South Jersey accent which somehow seemed to go with his attitude that nothing was too […]
December 19 – 23, 2016 The People of LWON, ever mindful of your comfort and convenience, have suggested some films to watch, should you happen to be sick and tired of holiday reality. But since you need to do the holidays regardless, Emma has a national-forest-gathered evergreen wreath with a dead wolf-lichen-covered branch hot-glued to […]