May 28 – June 1 2018 This week, LWON guest contributor Robin Meija takes a look under the hood of the Puerto Rico death toll numbers – and finds something disturbing in the statistics On a lighter note, do you like insane apocryphal philosophy and AI? Then you’ll love my story about Descartes’ robot daughter. […]
Michelle
We’re in the very near future, on a quiet beach, with seven young interns from the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference. In many ways, this conference is like any other; there are misunderstandings, arguments, and moments of insight. There’s some weird food, and some sleeping around. This conference, though, isn’t just for humans. It’s for […]
Few species are more frustrating to taxonomists than the North American caribou. Ranging from the Canadian Arctic to the Great Lakes, caribou vary enormously in size, color, antler shape, habitat, and behavior. Some aren’t much bigger than domestic dogs; others are almost big enough to rub shoulders with a moose. For more than two centuries, […]
“It’s like Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, but on dinner plates,” I told my nine-year-old daughter during a recent trip to London. She wasn’t entirely convinced, but she agreed to go with me and a friend to see the long-lost Famous Women Dinner Service, a set of 50 plates painted by the artists Vanessa […]
April 9 -13 What is it like to find yourself masticated by the outrage clickbait industrial complex? Regrettably, Michelle found out when her otherwise uncontroversial article about how to talk to your kids about climate change got “rebranded” for maximum outrage by an anti-climate change propaganda site. Warning: this is not an easy read. The comments […]
Last Thursday, The Atlantic published an essay of mine called “How I Talk to My Daughter About Climate Change.” It was about, well, exactly that, but it was also about how parents talk to their kids about all kinds of scary things—from climate change to terrorism to our current global politics. I hoped it made some […]
Not long ago I read The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, an excellent and, sadly, extremely relevant history by Linda Gordon. Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the KKK of the 1920s targeted not only African-Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants of all nationalities, […]
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that […]