Dance Party!

I miss dancing. One of my favorite activities as a kid was dropping the needle on our Hooked On Classics record and letting loose across the living room’s faded oriental rug. Later, I danced with gusto in church pageants, whether in charming second-grade square dances or hippie-esque liturgical dances that involved wearing leotards and waving […]

The Last Word, Turkey Day edition

November 19 – 23 I hope you nice people in the States had a lovely Thanksgiving. This week, Ginny introduced us to the sleep molecule. Jessa explained the 21st century superbear. It’s a hybrid between a polar bear and a grizzly, and it’s straight out of the anthropocene. Christie considered a status symbol shared by […]

Black Friday Special: 24 LWON posts for the price of one

One of my favorite newspaper columnists has a Thanksgiving column that has been reprinted more or less year after year for nearly two decades (or at least, that’s as far as the Chronicle’s online archives reveal). Along with talking about why, in a sea of holidays, Thanksgiving is the one that gets his wholehearted support, […]

The Last Word

5- 9 November In the most heartwarming post of the week, Cassie considered post-election bitterness and wondered what would happen if we treated politics less as a competitive sport, and more as an expedition. Ginny wrote an amazing examination of the fundamental mismatch between stories and science. Cameron noted that owls are trending. Michelle pondered whether the $300,000 […]

Coffeewise by Owl-Light

Owls are trending. At least that’s what a grumpy barista told my husband when he tried to get his owl coffee mug filled up. I used to like them before, she sniffed. We do seem to have accumulated a fair amount of owl paraphernalia in the last few years. Before, our house was an owl-free […]

The Last Word

Oct. 22 – 26 This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny. Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to make a movie about solving a math problem. Junk food everywhere = epidemic in obesity.  “We don’t know which […]

Migrations

When Iben Hove Sørensen flew to Ghana for her work with Dansk Ornitologisk Forening, a partner of BirdLife International, she couldn’t help but think about the birds. The passerines that she was headed south to study follow a similar course that her plane took to their wintering grounds–over the Mediterranean, sometimes through cloud-choked skies, for […]

The Last Word

24 – 28 September In which Cameron informs us that gull poop carries drug resistant bacteria that infests beaches, lakes and even dumps. Delightful stories abound of the falcons and dogs that have been dispatched to chase them off. But that makes me wonder: after they’re chased off, where do they take their pestilent cargo? […]