Redux: Do Peepguins Need Sweaters?

For Easter, we thought we’d bring back this adorable post from 2014. My friends and I didn’t enter this year–we thought someone else deserved a chance to shine. Also, if anyone wants to buy a lightly used Peeps diorama, we might consider selling. It would make great yarn shop decor. On Monday, I asked: Do […]

Holiday Redux: The Ceremonial Stone

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in slightly different form in July 2014. Sarah dipped her fingers in a red mineral paint and lifted them to her face. She put streaks above her cheekbones and up her chin, her design standing out against a backdrop […]

Holiday Redux: The Beauty of Punctuation

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in November 2013. Several years ago, I splurged on a gorgeous red hardcover edition of Strunk and White’s classic book on writing, The Elements of Style. Illustrated by Maira Kalman, the pages are filled with fanciful depictions of punctuation […]

Tesser Well

It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, […]

Donald Trump Is the World’s Greatest Performance Artist

“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.” – Stuart Chase Over the past few months, I’ve vaguely been aware that Donald Trump has been stirring up ideas that vaccinating children causes autism. Trump points out that many kids who get vaccinated also get autism. This is […]

Guest Post: Writing a Relationship

About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin […]

Draw Me a Picture of Nature

The literary critic Raymond Williams once wrote that “Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” It’s a head-scratcher right up there with love, or goodness: We depend on it for survival, but we’re often not quite sure where it is, what it is, or whether we’re a part of it. Jessica Mikels-Carrasco, […]

Guest Post: The Art (& Science) of Lefty Portraits

If neuroscientists could pick one idea to pack into a wormhole and expel to the outer reaches of the galaxy, there would be several worthy candidates. Some would probably pick the notion that you can “read” people’s tastes and preferences and even political ideologies on brain scans. Others might banish all talk of “neuroplasticity” and […]