My husband’s in the hospital (he’s going to be ok) for the foreseeable or the next couple of days, whichever comes first, and I’m there with him. In a hospital, you give up control — for excellent reasons — and you haven’t a clue about what’s next. Even if I were granted a clue, […]
Back in October 2013, Cassandra wrote a post about writers’ frustrations, sexual come-ons, and the hopeful hopelessness of the national navy in landlocked Bolivia. It’s a post so deeply horrible and so deeply sweet that we thought you’d like to read it again. For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die […]
The world is full of iniquity. Guys shoot up college classes; they also shoot up churches, malls, and elementary schools. Little kids get shot playing on their front porches. A hospital gets bombed and its doctors die. Drug companies raise prices of drugs for sick people by obscene amounts. Gun advocates keep the country locked […]
Sep 28 – Oct 2, 2015 Ok so Jennifer’s face looks a little older. Does anybody have a problem with that? Do babies? potential mates? Does natural selection? Anybody? No? Then screw it. New Person of LWON (oh joy!) Rose Eveleth got a new puppy. So cute. So energetic. So barky. So depressing. What can […]
Somewhere in the deep pits of my mind, I still think of “scientists” as remote people whose sentences I won’t understand, and of “science” as an incomprehensible body of knowledge I have to memorize. This is probably also the public’s image of science. But if 1000 years as a science writer have taught me nothing […]
I’d use this tactic on my nearest and dearest but it takes a certain emotional composure and psychological distance, and right when I should be doing killer obliviousness, I get irate and jump in with both feet and lose the argument entirely. I personally see this as a virtue. http://abstrusegoose.com/558
The two of us, my husband and I, took our breakfast toast, melon, and coffee out to the porch last Sunday morning, with late summer hanging on by its teeth. It was early, so the neighbors’ ACs were still off, and nobody was out yet. “It’s so quiet,” my husband said. Traffic out on Charles […]
Ann: Some time ago, I got interested in why European languages so often use the same word for “story” and “history.” Every English speaker knows that having one word for two such different things — fiction and truth, respectively — is anathema. But my thinking didn’t go much farther than that, it rarely does. So […]
