The hot, thick summer air in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can make you feel like you’re sitting in a sauna, wrapped in a soaking-wet wool blanket. As a recent, temporary transplant, staying in a house without air conditioning, I needed a place to cool off. I’ve gotten to know all my favorite places by immersing myself in their water—the lakes […]
Guest Post
It is Thing Appreciation Week at LWON, where we bring you the Greatest Hits of our previous posts about inanimate objects. Anne Sasso wrote this post in January of last year celebrating her pocket calculator, which has stood by her for 40 years while planned obsolescence ate all of her other devices — and their replacements. […]
This week at LWON we’re digging into the archives to celebrate the uncelebrated: inanimate objects. Many of them aren’t very impressive inanimate objects. And yet we love them. In December 2014 Nell Greenfieldboyce explained her obsession with paper clips. If you’ve ever worried about the feelings of an inanimate object, or thought about how amazing […]
This is the first post in LWON‘s 4,729th annual Snark Week, a tribute to the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, filled with what we hope is an equal amount of truthfulness, credibility, and creativity. If you happen to notice we’ve written about sloths before, you may consider the following a timely and urgent update — less […]
Let me tell you a story. In the summer of 1991, when I was 21 years old, I worked in a genetics lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. I wasn’t yet out, but had heard about a popular gay bar called Heaven in the city’s Montrose neighborhood. When a new friend asked me to […]
Over the last several years, Harvard economist Eric Maskin has been delivering a talk asking: “How Should We Elect Presidents?” Should the candidate with the most votes win? Not necessarily, according to Maskin. Maskin blames the U.S. system of plurality voting—whereby each voter casts their vote for one candidate and the candidate with the most […]
For the better part of 30 years, my head was firmly stuck in English. But when I moved to Italy three years ago, I also started my first genuine effort at picking up a second language. My barely remembered high school Spanish prepared me for some things about Italian, like the gendered nouns and overwhelming […]
My first sighting of one of life’s everyday astonishments was as a little fellow in the 1960s, sitting unbuckled in the back seat of my family’s ’57 Chevy. Whenever we hit the highway on our way to the Jersey shore or the Lower East Side of Manhattan where my grandparents lived, we would approach and […]