When it comes to complex courtship displays, birds of paradise are right up there. They do this whole hanging-upside-down-from-a-branch thing. And granted, the mantis shrimp has an impressive suite of wooing manoeuvres, used to communicate amorous intentions to the potential mate in question (otherwise the wooer might come across as an aggressor to the wooee). […]
Nature
A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food. An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out. To distract you from making a judgment about whether AG is a dick or […]
My friend Taya and I were out at her parents’ country place, about twelve acres in the western foothills of the Cascades. I was maybe eight, visiting for the first time. Taya was taking me on a tour. We were struggling along, as short-legged people do through dense, early successional Northwest forest. She stopped and […]
He surely didn’t know it, but journalist David Dobbs recently put his finger on a problem that’s been bugging me for some time. Writing in his Wired blog, Dobbs made the observation that, In my own life, many if not most of my most vital social connections — bonds of mutual benefit and regard — […]
In the festive spirit of LWON’s first birthday celebration, Jessa asked me the following question: “ Squirrel it however you like — War: What is it good for?” The answer follows. What is war good for? Absolutely nothing. Listen to me–I’ll say it again: absolutely nothing. Huh. And yet … Edwin Starr had it absolutely […]
When I first moved to New Mexico from the east coast I asked somebody how to tell the difference between a juniper and a piñon pine. Easy, they said: most of the junipers are alive and the piñons are all dead. Across the Southwest, piñon pines have been dying off over the past twenty years […]
Like Ann, I’m a recent convert to the charm of crows. This has led to a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them. Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying part: Crows remember Roger. They don’t […]
A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak-oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints — about suburbs, cheese doodles, Wal-Mart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I’d grown up in the […]
