This week as summer hits its balmy peak, we look back at LWON posts from summers gone by. Five years ago, Richard spent his summer vacation in Chile’s winter, getting to know the astronomers and donkeys of the Chilean mountainside. It’s classic Richard, basically, and the delight is in the details. Here it is.
LWON came out of its redux mode this week with a crop of fresh posts. A mourning dove laid an egg in Cameron’s house while she was away. The LWON commenters confirm it: mourning doves will lay their eggs anywhere and may need a little more attention from Mother Evolution. Craig returns to the Grand […]
It is Thing Appreciation Week at LWON, where we bring you the Greatest Hits of our previous posts about inanimate objects. Anne Sasso wrote this post in January of last year celebrating her pocket calculator, which has stood by her for 40 years while planned obsolescence ate all of her other devices — and their replacements. […]
June 6-10, 2016 Rose spends a month on in a ship in the North Sea, and finds herself engaging deeply with issues of scale. A prominent naturalist lives a quiet life in small-town Washington – amassing 150,000 specimens – and his neighbors have no idea who he is until after his death. “There ain’t nothing […]
On Memorial Day, Christie remembers the children who suffer in wartime. Donald Trump benefits from plurality voting, writes guest Siobhan Roberts. We should switch to a ranking system. We have ideas about what constitutes a good death. Christie asks, from whose perspective? What if we stopped trying to cure cancer and learned how to manage […]
Recently I had cause to wonder whether I was experiencing the famous “burnout syndrome”. I had been asked to give a talk to an auditorium full of gifted high school students. As I hurriedly prepared the speech – wondering what one should say to gifted children about their own giftedness – all I wanted to […]
May 16-20, 2016 In the hierarchy of correspondence forms, nothing beats a physical letter, writes Christie, particularly for their superior ability to be stumbled upon. Cassie threw up her hands in despair about climate change – and her intractable fatalism about it – and LWON’s trusty commenters took the ball and ran with it. Wherever […]
April 25-29, 2016 This week, Veronique Greenwood’s glancing knowledge of Mandarin becomes a daunting challenge, spurred on by some tentative communicative exchanges in China. Some argue that Shakespeare couldn’t have written some of his plays because the author of the plays knew too much. There’s another explanation: Perhaps he acted like a journalist. Helen bore […]
