Last summer, I spent nearly a whole day sitting by the river in my hometown with an old friend from grade school. For most of it, we didn’t talk. It was not an easy task for me at first. Although I like quiet, the river I usually swim in is made of words: writing, talking, […]
Guest Post
Here’s a mystery story. Characters include: monkeys, a genius-cum-child molester, an obsessive virologist, and a lot of really scary diseases. Oh and animal models. In the mid-1980s, monkeys at the New England Primate Research Center began to die. The disease struck only a handful of rhesus macaques – monkeys from Asia that have bald, pink […]
Thanks to HBO’s Game of Thrones, I’ve become engrossed by George R. R. Martin’s remarkable setting that sometimes feels more like medieval historical fiction than fantasy. It’s the first time I’ve admired a fantasy setting in years. Its gray-shaded characters and the complex society of Westeros, where most of the story takes place, brings a relatable […]
I recently learned that my colleagues think I am a coward. And even more recently, I learned that I might agree with them. It all began in 2007. That was a magic year for science writers. That was the year the IPCC released its crushing assessment on climate change, just after the surprise hit of […]
The end of the world has been preying on my mind lately. Not in a religious, horsemen-of-the-apocalypse way ‒— but in a more surviving-the-failure-of-modern-amenities way. One reason for this preoccupation is my generation’s fascination not only with zombie film and literature1 but with interactive zombie games, like elaborate tag variation humans vs zombies, races with […]
I go to a lot of natural history museums. Something about all those pretty rocks and dead animals, and the chance that I might see something I’ve never seen before or learn something new—I can’t resist it. In the last three years, I’ve been to at least 15 natural history museums on two continents. Here’s […]
This week on LWON’s occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday, we bring you wisdom from not one but two authors of newly released books about private parts. (Count your blessings, people.) Florence Williams is the author of BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History; Jesse Bering is the author of Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And […]
One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe […]
