Looking at Lichen in 2018

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, a beautiful sunny afternoon, I met a friend and her sister in a park along a creek for a lichen walk. I had a small obsession with lichens a few years ago, and I wrote about it in a three-part series for this blog. (Part one, part two, part three.) […]

Singing Our Hearts Out

This was originally posted August 5, 2013. I just spent all weekend singing with many of the same people I was singing with then, so I thought this – my first post as a person of LWON – was worth sharing again.  Recently I was rehearsing a glorious 16th-century motet with a group of 20 […]

Quirky Little Nature Essays Don’t Seem Quite Right Today

My favorite kind of post, in the years I’ve been writing here at LWON, has been about little moments of urban nature. A few weeks ago the bumblebees were all over the sunflowers at the community garden, and they were wonderful. I’m still excited about the vulture I saw swoop down to the railroad tracks […]

Announcing: A Science-Themed Peeps Contest

I’m not sure where the idea first came from. I think it was tossed around in a comment section – here on LWON, maybe, or on a Facebook post. And it seemed like a great idea. But it also seemed like a lot of work. It turns out, if you want to do something that […]

The Pawpaw – A Local Fruit

When’s the last time you tried a new fruit? The last time I did, I think I was probably in a tropical country, or eating something grown in a tropical country. But on Sunday I tried a new fruit from right here in the temperate latitudes. The pawpaw is the largest native fruit in North […]

Midnight in a Sleepy City: The comic wildlife guide

My friend Kate and I use U2 concerts as an excuse to travel and see new cities. But earlier this summer the band had scheduled a couple of nights here in Washington, D.C., so we decided to spend the days before the first concert taking part in the fan-run general admission line. Fans show up […]

Redux: On the Path of Totality

Remember this time last year, when we were all so excited about the eclipse? And then it really was as good as everyone said it would be? Here’s the post I wrote on my laptop in the back seat of a car in the massive I-95 traffic jam on August 22, 2017.   I’m writing […]

The Last Word

July 30 – August 3: Climate, sex, and death edition Everyone is getting nervous about the climate these days, or the weather, or the fires, or the droughts, or all the opaque but undeniable links that bind them. Emma is not so much nervous as she is furious. We’ve known about climate change – and […]