First, a warning: Normally LaWonians talk about science. Today I failed. This post has nothing to do with science. I’m sorry. Marilyn Hagerty, a restaurant reviewer for the Grand Forks Herald, never expected to be famous. But then a new Olive Garden opened in Grand Forks. Hagerty reviewed it. And the rest is cyberspace history. […]
A week ago, I found myself sitting in a small phlebotomy room at the back of my doctor’s office. Had you been a fly on the wall, this is what you would have observed: On one side of me stood a young nurse holding a hollow needle and a glass tube with a brown rubber […]
In 2001, Mary Leitao noticed something odd: a fiber poking out of an irritated patch of skin on her two-year-old son’s lip. In the weeks to come, more fibers emerged. Leitao examined them under the light of her RadioShack microscope, but she couldn’t figure out what they were. So she turned to the internet. There she […]
On a hot and humid day in October, a man wandered through the city of Mirebalais, Haiti. He was naked, but his neighbors didn’t pay much attention. The man had always been crazy. In fact, townspeople called him “moun fou” — lunatic or fool. He headed toward the bank of the Latem River, where he […]
You know the feeling: somebody has something and you want it for yourself. That thing may be talent, or success, or good looks, or something simple . . . like a bag of chips. For me, the emotion is all too familiar. See that cute girl on the subway? The one with curly blonde hair, […]
In October, 2006, I wrote a story that began like this . . . “In a hangar-sized building at the University of Maryland, Dan Lathrop is playing God. He and his students are cobbling together a three-meter titanium ‘earth’ that—when spun—they hope will give birth to a magnetic field similar to that generated by the […]
The city of Milwaukee is not a good place to be an infant. For every 1,000 babies born there, more than 10 die before their first birthday. Among black families, the number is even higher — 14 out of 1,000. The national average is about 6.5. So it’s no wonder the Milwaukee Health Department is […]
Happy Halloween! I want to tell you a scary story. A decade ago, the planet had six billion people. Today, according to the United Nations, we have seven billion. The UN has chosen Halloween as the symbolic day when the seventh billion person will come screaming into existence. Not scared yet? Maybe these words from […]