I have neighbors who were also friends who have just moved away. I look at their house now and they’re not in it, it’s empty, they’re gone. I’m sad. Why should I care so much? It’s what urban America does, it moves away — stays a while, then moves somewhere else. I’m used to it. […]
April 10 – 14, 2017 The word was, DC’s famous cherry blossoms had died untimely deaths due to cold and ice. Wrong, says Helen, and proves it, sepal by sepal, petal by petal. The music behind the math in movies, says Guest Stephen Ornes, can sound just like the math: doubling back, laying down patterns, […]
[UPDATE: see links below* for the titles of predatory journals] In honor of the posts of Michelle Nijhuis and Christie Aschwanden, too many posts to link to, about the detection, prevention, and treatment of bullshit. I hate being lied to. I purely hate it. I hate it with a cold, hard hate. I understand that […]
March 27 – 31, 2017 One of LWON’s preoccupations is with the prevention, detection, and abolition of bullshit. Christie, who often writes about controversies, gets angry emails which she understands and which suggest to her bullshit’s cause. Cassie’s friend, Neda, has lots of hair which she wears in a bun which, every time she goes […]
February 27 – March 3, 2017 In uncertain times, Michelle turns to crime novels, the one certain world in which reasoning is logical, evidence is crucial, mysteries are solved, and the good guys win. Jennifer calls her Aunt Judy (famed commenter on LWON), asks how she’s doing. “Terrible,” she says. So Jennifer calls her dad, […]
Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard. Writing about good people is close to impossible. I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good. He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to […]
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 […]
