It began with a software engineer in India. The man’s email signature says that he works in “Dreams Sustainment (Offshore).” His note with the subject line “Regarding INC5760131” referred to some technical issue that was virtually incomprehensible to anyone who was not among the email’s intended recipients. And there were a lot of unintended recipients. […]
On Writing
In the past year I’ve gotten extremely interested in books about creativity and creation. I used to hate these kinds of books. I thought they were self indulgent and annoying. And many of them are. But I’ve found a few I really like, and I like them because they don’t actually talk all that much […]
I don’t expect anyone to notice, but I’ve been on hiatus from Last Word On Nothing while I focused my attention on writing a book. With the book finished, I’ve decided it’s time to start blogging here again. My return wasn’t a given. Time away from LWON was an opportunity to contemplate whether I should […]
A neighborhood kid, maybe 10 years old, doesn’t have the usual relationship with gravity. I know it’s her even when I can’t see her clearly by the way she moves through space: even when she’s not running, just walking, she looks like she might re-connect with the earth but also she might not. She reminds […]
The lovely and absorbing new book Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, began when author Juli Berwald, a marine scientist turned technical writer, was factchecking an article about ocean acidification for National Geographic. She was asked to confirm a seemingly simple claim, made in a graphic, that jellyfish would be among […]
The Awl died. Or will die, in a couple of weeks. It was/is a website with the usual internet attitude – an awl, dear children, is a sharp pointed instrument for punching holes — but not the usual internet manners. My Twitter feed is full of writers who were young a few years ago, who […]
Last week Michelle wrote that, given the speed of change in the reality under the science, climatology needed some new words, and she proposed a beauty: “antevernal,” meaning “daffodils blooming in February.” To back her word-making, she quoted a naturalist: “If the language we use to speak of the natural world is not innovative and […]
When Robert Macfarlane recently chose “antevernals” as one of his words of the day, I remembered this post, which I wrote in February 2016. Now we need a word to describe our continent’s increasingly split-screen winters. How about twinter? Or splinter? And climate change isn’t the only phenomenon demanding new vocabulary: I sometimes hear others […]
