The Last Word

May 7 – May 11 To commemorate mother’s day, Cassie starts the week by wondering whether paper/rock/scissors is a good way to trick her indecisive biological clock; Making the case that Cassie should take the plunge, Cameron introduces us to the unforgettable stadium metaphor; Christie says a family of two is a family too; Jessa […]

Motherhood: Immaculate gestation

“Mommy, why did you kill me?” was the first line of the comment. It devolved from there into a maudlin, hallucinatory, and occasionally Freudian fantasy of an aborted child’s final message to his mother, and it ended with the little guy playing baseball with God in heaven while the mother burned in hell. The reply […]

The Last Word

April 30 – May 4 Guest poster Sam McDougle starts the week the only way any week should ever start: with space dinosaurs. Anyway, his post seems to be about space dinosaurs; inside, you find a question about how far scientists should stretch the implications of their research to draw attention to the science (I […]

The Last Word

April 23 – April 27 This week, Ann does what put Ann on the map: she tells us about spy organisations and what they like to do in space. And then tells us about the citizen scientists who use binoculars, stopwatches and math to figure out what they’re up to up there. With the help […]

tl;dr — a manifesto

Spend enough time on the internet and you’ll spot one. They tend to sprout in the comments beneath articles like little text cabbages: tl;dr tl;dr tl;dr Unpack them and you’ll find an accusation: “too long; didn’t read.” This isn’t some hot new trend I’m cluing you into: tl;dr hasn’t been de rigeur since it became […]

The Last Word

April 9 – April 13 Oh, are you having a bad day? JUST BE GLAD YOU’RE NOT A BIRD. Because if you were a bird, as Ann points out, you would go through puberty every single year of your life. Nature, Ann correctly summarises, is one mean mother. Maybe you’re just irritable because people keep […]

Get off my lawn

You remember the late 1990s. Money grew on trees, and if your money-picking arm got sore, you could just hold out your skirt to catch the falling sky-money. Take my friend X, who made $90,000 one year freelancing as a PowerPoint guy. Masters of the universe who didn’t understand caps lock threw bags of cash […]

The Last Word

March 12 – 16 This week, Ann explored closed system sibling knowledge, which just turns out to be another of nature’s subtle tricks to make sure we don’t kill each other Cassie did the internet a favour by saying something original, interesting and nuanced about Marilyn Hagerty Michelle wondered where the secret gardens have gone […]