How We Broke up with Our Phones (Sort Of)

Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life was just published 10 days ago, but since we here at LWON are not confined by space or time, we can already tell you how her 30-day plan worked for us. Last spring, the two of us were […]

How I Eat Salad At Work

I’ve always had trouble with lunches at the office. No matter what I took from home, it was almost always not that good. Reheated leftovers? I wanted more. Peanut butter and jelly? Just sad. At my current job, if left to my own devices, I would go to the pizza place across the street every […]

Redux: A Visit to the Museum of Osteology

This post originally ran March 31, 2015. I knew what I expected from the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City: amusement. I go to a lot of museums, and in my experience, privately-run museums based on one person’s obsession are always quirky and often pretty fun. This museum was founded by a guy and his […]

What’s So Great About Walking

The other afternoon, at work, I suddenly got stuck thinking about a couple of things I’m worried about–and which I’m going to do, even though they make me want to hide under the covers. I expect my medal any day now. By the end of the day, I was jumpy and exhausted from pointless worrying, […]

Moors: Love or Hate? Discuss.

Helen: Ann, we’re here because you said you hate moors. I am currently having a love affair with moors, so I want to know: Why? Also, we’re here because I suspect this will give us an opportunity to talk about how much we hate Wuthering Heights. Unless you like Wuthering Heights. Do you like Wuthering […]

On the Path of Totality

I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95. When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on […]

Redux: Plodding With My Father

A couple of years ago I climbed Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park with my dad. I’m back in Colorado this week, again with family, so I thought it was a good time to recall that hike. The Milky Way hung overhead. The lights from the far-off plains made a faint glow in the […]

Wild-Animal Painting in the Jungle

It’s not obvious how to draw a snake. Here, let Isabel Cooper tell you about it, in a 1924 article she wrote for The Atlantic Monthly. For instance, there’s no such thing as a school of snake artists, so when the problem of making a portrait of a snake presented itself I had to think […]