I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for members of the British royal family. But last month, when the press reported that a pregnant Kate Middleton had been hospitalized with hyperemesis gravidarum, my stomach lurched in sympathy. Pregnancy-related hyperemesis is usually described as “severe morning sickness,” but that doesn’t capture the suffering it involves. […]
I don’t care if they’re real. I’m just grateful for the texting fails collected on DamnYouAutocorrect. Maybe a guy really did offer to cook his girlfriend “chicken vaginas” instead of chicken fajitas; maybe a mom described her toddlers as having “pornstaches” instead of milkstaches in their Christmas photos; maybe a dad told his kids that […]
“Is it the mummies?” Tom asked. When I confessed my fear of archaeology to the LWON crew, Thomas Hayden immediately blamed the undead. Or long dead. Which was quite reasonable, really. But I’m a lapsed biologist; I like decay. I like a lot of other things about archaeology, too. I like its stories about people […]
So the election’s over, the days are getting shorter, and it’s about time for a nice long nap. May I suggest an 80-foot-long concrete chamber, tucked neatly into a hillside in Tennessee? Clean, cool, and cozy, it’s the perfect winter hideaway … if you’re a bat, that is. Yes, The Nature Conservancy of Tennessee has […]
We’ve got a lot of dead trees in the Rockies. More than usual. As the region has warmed, bark beetle populations have exploded, and they’ve been killing off massive swaths of pine and spruce. It’s hard to miss the damage, and when British landscape artist Chris Drury visited the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie, […]
In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. […]
My neighborhood, as I’ve mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money’s on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a […]
During a recent reporting trip to central China, I went to a banquet honoring a group of visiting foreign scientists. I’d heard about these banquets: red tablecloths, elaborate dinnerware, a procession of courses long enough to turn eating into an athletic event. But what were these miniature wineglasses, filled so deftly with clear liquid? The […]