The Last Word

March 5 – March 9 Today I’m calling on the power of the crowd to resolve an internal debate: What do you hear yourself think when you see the letters LWON? Are we LaWon or Elwon? The reason I ask is that this week, we got a new person of LWON! Do I welcome Cameron […]

The Last Word

February 20 – 24 This week, Michelle bestowed upon a grateful universe the phrase “probably unpleasant but non-lethal chipmunk ear punches” Cassie wept as a doctor sang to her awkwardly in Spanish Ann showed us that up close, cosmological dark matter looks like poppies Tom found the sole heir to They Might Be Giants’ science […]

Crying Shame

A week ago, I found myself sitting in a small phlebotomy room at the back of my doctor’s office. Had you been a fly on the wall, this is what you would have observed: On one side of me stood a young nurse holding a hollow needle and a glass tube with a brown rubber […]

LWOVE

Love is the opposite of the snowclone; unlike the apocryphal 200 words available to Eskimos to describe falling cold white stuff, the English language outrageously, improbably offers only a single option to encompass how we feel about pizza and our only child. And if language is the scaffolding against which we form our entire construct […]

Humanity Under Attack: The Story of Morgellons

In 2001, Mary Leitao noticed something odd: a fiber poking out of an irritated patch of skin on her two-year-old son’s lip. In the weeks to come, more fibers emerged. Leitao examined them under the light of her RadioShack microscope, but she couldn’t figure out what they were. So she turned to the internet. There she […]

The Problem with Patient Zero

On a hot and humid day in October, a man wandered through the city of Mirebalais, Haiti. He was naked, but his neighbors didn’t pay much attention. The man had always been crazy. In fact, townspeople called him “moun fou” — lunatic or fool. He headed toward the bank of the Latem River, where he […]

The Seven Deadly Sins: Envy

You know the feeling: somebody has something and you want it for yourself. That thing may be talent, or success, or good looks, or something simple . . . like a bag of chips. For me, the emotion is all too familiar. See that cute girl on the subway? The one with curly blonde hair, […]

Waiting for Dynamo

In October, 2006, I wrote a story that began like this . .  . “In a hangar-sized building at the University of Maryland, Dan Lathrop is playing God. He and his students are cobbling together a three-meter titanium ‘earth’ that—when spun—they hope will give birth to a magnetic field similar to that generated by the […]