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 […]
On Writing
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 […]
This post first ran on January 28, 2015. But I still love flicker, ripple, chuckle and clusterfuck the word (but not the thing). Words are a writer’s currency, and we each have our favorites. The first word I remember falling in love with was onomatopoeia. It had a satisfying rhythm, plus there was the delight […]