Every year, some media entity terrifies the nation with a Shark Week. We here at LWON feel strongly that sharks, while terrifying, look scary and live in the ocean and therefore are pretty easy to recognize and avoid. Much harder to recognize and avoid are the innocent-looking, furry, feathery animals that under the pretense of […]
June 20 – 24, 2016 I start researching for a story and you know how that goes, rabbit hole, branching rabbit hole, another branch, another, and pretty soon I’m so far into Ballykilcline and Texas I’m never coming home. After a day in which we, for the first time in history, forgot to post anything, […]
I’m having trouble with a story. First I went down one rabbit hole (the effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the Irish Potato Famine) until it branched into two (now-dead towns, one in Maryland, one in Ireland), and then I went down both. You can picture me heading down one, scrambling back up, […]
May 23 – 27, 2016 Remember Erik’s argument that cultures have their own keywords/cyphers? Guest Sean Treacy says that the keyword for Italian culture is “bella,” beauty, to such an extent that the beautiful also defines the good. Think about that a minute. Every year since he was a kid, Erik’s gone on The Ride […]
This is the latest in a series in which science’s metaphors offer the explanations of and guidance for the most cryptic of life’s problems. A few weeks ago I was at a conference about galaxy evolution. In the titles of many talks was the puzzling phrase, “secular evolution.” Secular? as opposed to religious? so secular […]
May 2 – 6, 2016 Guest Veronique Greenwood’s final post in her series about learning Chinese ends with triumph: she not only argues with a Chinese cab driver, she wins. Meanwhile the rest of the LWONers were inspired, got into the act, and voila! ecco! ¡mira! a whole Week of Learning Languages posts! Richard proposes […]
I’ll start this at the beginning. Recently Friend of LWON, Chris Arnade, posted a picture of himself — which itself was not unusual because Chris is, among other things, a photographer and posts pictures of himself right along with pictures of other people. But the picture was unusual. Chris is a very serious guy and always […]
This post originally ran on November 11, 2013. I rerun it now partly because I liked it and mostly because it’s a conversation with Hope Jahren and Ben Lillie. Hope has a new book out, written with her usual brilliant, nail-gun verve; Ben runs an on-going travelling theatrical anthology that’s like nothing else I’ve heard of. […]
