Two nights ago I sat in a theater watching the film “The Martian.” I loved seeing a viable spacecraft making gravitational slingshots around planets while a stranded, potato-growing astronaut claimed himself the first colonist on Mars. What’s there not to love? Meanwhile, in my coat pocket I carried an object from an entirely different age […]
Archeology
For me, geography is a time machine. The shape of the land sets the dials. Artifacts are keys. A few days ago I was watching for mammoth hunters out a train window. Climbing through the Rocky Mountains on the California Zephyr, I looked for spear bearers in the bony canyons and pine woods along the […]
Nearly a year ago last May, the mercurial leader of Boko Haram announced the fate of 276 schoolgirls that he and his men kidnapped from a secondary school in Chibok, Nigeria. Standing in front of a video camera and tugging at a red hat, Abubakar Shekau laughed as he read from a prepared statement. “I […]
As of yesterday, May 20, LWON has been alive for five years. LWON is a little surprised at this and pretty pleased with itself. In celebration, two of our brilliant alumni wrote guest posts listing the Top Five Things They Wanted to List the Top Five Of. Today, Five People of LWON announce the best […]
The biggest science story this week was really, really big. Brontosaurus, weighing in at about 16 metric tons, is a taxonomic contender once again, thanks to a 300 page long cladistic analysis in the online journal PeerJ. (Spoiler alert: Yes, the rest of this piece will include puns, jokes and allusions to classic films just […]
It would have been different if it hadn’t been a cave, if the excavation had been out in the daylight where mystery more easily washes out. The darkness helped, nothing but my headlamp to show the way. Every morning we’d suit up at the cave entrance. A group of scientists descended a ladder one by […]
This time last year, most of North America was buried in an unusual cold period. The jet stream had hemorrhaged in early January and the Polar Vortex that usually sits atop the hemisphere like a halo came pouring down. Known as the 2014 North American Cold Wave, temperatures plummeted, particularly in the Northeast and Upper […]
Camped with seven adults and five children on the south-central coast of Alaska, I was doing a little writing experiment. I had been following possible Paleolithic routes, taking off with adventurers across glaciers and mountains to get a sense of living and traveling in the same landscapes people faced tens of thousands of years ago. […]
