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The Last Word On Nothing

"Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

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Books by Us

Sally Adee

We Are Electric: the New Science of Our Body’s Electrome

Christie Aschwanden

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery

Rebecca Boyle

Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

Craig Childs

Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places

Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America

Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Future of the Earth

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession

The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

The Way Out: A True Story of Ruin and Survival

The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert

Ann Finkbeiner

After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss through the Years

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe

Jessa Gamble

The Siesta and the Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time

Ben Goldfarb

Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

Jennifer Holland

Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom

Unlikely Loves: 43 Heartwarming True Stories from the Animal Kingdom

Unlikely Heroes: 37 Inspiring Stories of Courage and Heart from the Animal Kingdom

Unlikely Friendships Dogs: 37 Stories of Canine Compassion and Courage

Richard Panek

The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum (with Temple Grandin)

Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens

The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes

Eric Wagner

Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish (with photographer Tom Reese)

Penguins in the Desert

After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens

Cameron Walker

National Monuments of the USA

What’s That Quote?

Science is first of all about discovery (the first word on everything). But the more science knows, the more it realizes what it doesn’t know (the last word on nothing). Curiosity and humility: the human condition.

What’s on the Banner?

A rotation of images courtesy of the excellent Biodiversity Heritage Library and the superb Public Domain Review. We’ll let you know what each image is as soon as we get the time and inclination.

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Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved.
The writing on this blog belongs to the person who wrote it and should not be re-published without explicit permission of the author. Thank you!

The header images courtesy of the astounding Public Domain Review https://publicdomainreview.org/about/ and the equally splendid Biodiversity Heritage Library https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

Decode by Scott Smith

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Subjects and Writers

Subjects and Writers

Who’s Up Next?

11/25 Christie

11/27 Emily

11/29 Kate

Archives

Archives

Prizes & New Books

Cameron Walker just published an unexpected book called How To Capture Carbon: Stories that is, according to our Richard Panek, quirky, witty, whipsmart, “insightful, sometimes mischievously so, and somehow altogether uncategorizable.”

Frequent Guest-Poster of LWON, Sarah DeWeerdt, won an Excellence in Science Journalism prize from the National Academies for 3 stories on 3 very different subject.

Best American and Nature Writing of 2024 is just out, and includes (why wouldn’t it) stories by Ben Goldfarb (The City of Glass) and ex-Person of LWON Emma Marris (The Sea Eagles that Returned to Mull).

Richard Panek, ex-Person of LWON and ongoing Friend, has just published The Pillars of Creation, about the astonishing JWST and how it got started and why and where it fits in our minds’ comprehension of It All.

Heather Pringle, Founder of LWON, just published The Northwomen with Penguin Random House. It’s about what the archeological record has finally gotten around to saying about Viking women. You would not want a Viking woman as an enemy.

Becky Boyle’s Our Moon, published by Penguin Random House, takes the moon personally and not everybody can get away with that. The book was the lead review of the NY Times Book Review. AND it has been longlisted for the National Book Award — which is just stellar! Ok, lunar!

Nell Greenfieldboyce, Friend of LWON, just published Transient and Strange with W.W. Norton. It’s a book of startling science-adjacent essays, and not everybody can get away with that either. One essay began life as an LWON post about a spider at her window.

Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings, with Norton Press, is about his preoccupation — other than beavers — with the ecology of roadkill. The book is on 2023’s year-end-best lists of the New York Times, Kirkus, Science News, the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards. And in 2024, it won the Sierra Club’s Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing.

Cameron Walker’s new book, National Monuments of the USA, is for kids, and writing honestly about national monuments is a harder than you’d think.

Sally Adee’s new book, We Are Electric, published by Hachette Press, was glowed upon in a New York Times review which featured the phrase, “the long grass of some mightily weird modern research.”

Craig Child’s newest book is Tracing Time, published by Torrey House Press, about the rock art on his home Colorado Plateau.

One advantage of writing for free for LWON is that you can write about things that have triggered books or have fallen out of their research. So: Sarah’s seabirds, Sally’s bioelectricity, Craig’s rock art, Ben’s roadkill.