In which Emily undergoes a trial which will stand her in good stead (what does that phrase even mean? can you stand in steads? what’s a stead? are some steads good and some bad?) when undergoing future trials. This first ran January 3, 2019. “This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we […]
The little creek that runs along the railroad tracks through Bellefonte, Pennsylvania is beautiful at this time of year, shallow water running clear and dark, banks and bare branches covered in snow. The creek is a tributary of Bald Eagle Creek, itself a tributary of the West Branch Susquehanna. It’s the place my husband first learned […]
I used to work at the Science news office in the American Association for the Advancement of Science office in DC. As anyone who’s been there will tell you, there’s something special about the AAAS building — the dark polished rock exterior, the spiral staircase that, as you climb from floor to floor, takes you […]
This post first appeared in November 2023. For reasons I didn’t fully understand myself (marriage? the cat? surely someone or something else was to blame), I was feeling more than usually lazy, or maybe just unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of writing. It felt like a dangerous malaise, and the only remedy I could think of […]
Happy spider mating season! I keep finding baby spiders in my shoes, and every morning there are new cobwebs in my car’s steering wheel. Maybe you’re seeing more spiders, too? Our own LWONian Betsy Mason wrote about the noble art of counting spiders for Knowable Magazine last year. And this little post first ran in […]
Our one-year-old strokes his hair when he’s tired, twirling his curls between his fingers. That’s how he puts himself to sleep — eyelids drooping, drooping, down. Neuroscientists call this lazy, rhythmic caressing “slow touch” or “affective touch.” It moves across the skin at one to 10 centimeters per second — faster than a snail, slower […]
We took Will out in an inflatable kayak for the first time today, wearing a tiny wetsuit. He looked so solemn as he inspected the boat, and kept grabbing Pete’s paddle – at least three times the length of his body – once we were in the water. I swam alongside the boat. Every time […]
This winter and late spring, when we all had mono and a variety of flus and colds and for a while thought Pete might have cancer, we spent a lot of time on the couch watching Pete’s favorite comfort shows. I was scared and trying not to be dramatic about it, but I couldn’t stop […]
