As the inimitable Virginia Hughes shuffles off to that corner of the internet circumscribed by the yellow rectangle, we welcome frequent guest contributor Erik Vance as a full-fledged Person of LWON. A self-described “non-native invasive,” Erik lives and works in Mexico City, thereby completing the NAFTA strategy here at LWON, and helping us colonize a […]
“Hey Hayden, can you say caption?” Those five words haunt me still, more than a dozen years after I first heard them. The set up: an article I’d been working on about wooly mammoths had, in the course of a week, been incrementally demoted from a full page down to – no joke – a […]
Back in March 2012, more than 2,500 people declared their support for a pretty modest idea: that the world is full of interesting, relevant, important science stories that aren’t being told. No shocker there — that’s pretty much the operating principle of LWON, too, or one of them anyway. But these particular people did something […]
The outline of the story is as familiar as it is tawdry: a group of high school boys turn sexual insecurity into a contest, and a contest into emotional brutality. Adults in their orbit express shock and outrage, and observers pretend that the migration of teen sleaze onto the Internet represents something new. But why […]
Have you ever turned a buckskin whincher, or cradled a chicken-egg recursion device in the palm of your hand? Or caught a quantum of anti-matter and held it by the tail? They’re all quite possible, it turns out, though you need Big Science for one, and a quite a lot of art for the other […]
Something surprising happened last week: I heard a new song, and I liked it. Liked it enough to want to find out who sang it, and how I could hear more. Once, that would have been utterly unremarkable. For a good part of my twenties and thirties, I was a music junkie. I went out […]
Some parents, especially those with writerly or scientific tendencies, cope with the shock of having reproduced by chronicling every twist and turn as their progeny move from mewling rage ball to drooling tyrant, and beyond. Not for the me the introspection and fearless truth telling of Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s […]
There are a lot of ways to follow the progress of the Curiosity rover as it probes the geological history of Mars. But you could do worse than following one of her drivers, Scott Maxwell, on twitter (@marsroverdriver). Sure, his tweeted celebration of Curiosity’s successful touchdown late Sunday night — “Hey, I still have a […]