The Last Word On Nothing

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

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From Freud to Feynman: Curious Thoughts of Curious Minds

I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder! The poet: Richard P. Feynman. The occasion: an undergraduate philosophy term paper at MIT. A great work of poetry? Perhaps not. An example of profound thinking and the ability to render a complex […]

WWGD?

Dear WWGD: I am a postdoc working on an important scientific problem, one that I find rewarding and challenging. But a month before the end of the funding cycle, our team had a budget surplus, at which point my supervisor suggested that I find a way to spend it. Otherwise, he sighed, we’ll never […]

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Decode by Scott Smith

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Who’s Up Next?

11/18 Craig

11/20 Jenny

11/22 Helen

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.