I. We’ve been slowly cutting back on meat. It’s better for us and better for the planet. Not to mention the exploited workers on the factory farms—did you see that John Oliver segment? After it came out, we said let’s take things one step further: No more buying meat for our household from the grocery […]
Guest Post
When I was a few weeks pregnant, I met a new friend, who is an expert in sanitation for low-resource contexts, for coffee in The Hague, where I live. I hadn’t told her about my status, but she must have gotten some whiff of a pheromone or something because she mentioned, off-handedly, that a program […]
My work has become opening digital files to search for signs of life. The biggest thing I do, the midday ritual of checking emails. Refresh, refresh. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! I’m a saint. I miss you, Ms. Dusto. I’m dad, away on business. Can I please have an extension? This morning we got my Auntie’s […]
One of our cats, the gray tabby female, hasn’t been eating well lately. We’re not sure how long this has been going on. Has it been since late February, around the time the first victim of COVID-19 in Washington State died in a hospital 10 miles from where we live in Seattle? Did it start […]
For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait. Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill across my monitor, lighting up cells in my eyes with photons from a screen from a file […]
Twenty biomedical companies. Seventy nations. An aggressive search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines is underway worldwide. Yet even 21st-century technology can’t match one man who curbed a major influenza pandemic spreading across the United States in 1957. Pioneering virologist Maurice Hilleman, now oft-forgotten, detected that pandemic from across the globe, convinced reluctant U.S. health officials […]
I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter, desperate for some fresh morsel of information: an update of confirmed case numbers (local, national, global), an official who said something […]
Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, slightly fixed up. A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human in […]