The Last Word On Nothing

"Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

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On May 10, I leave my house in northern Washington state just after dawn. I drive alone along a braided river, over sagebrush plateaus, and through fields of golden flowers. Then one plane across the Cascades, and another across the Rockies, to finally land in my my childhood home in Colorado. I’ve come to stand […]

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Who’s Up Next?

10/14 Ben

10/16 Cameron

10/18 Penny

Prizes & New Books

Heather Pringle, Founder of LWON, just published The Northwomen with Penguin Random House. It’s about what the archeological record has finally gotten around to saying about Viking women. You would not want a Viking woman as an enemy.

Becky Boyle’s Our Moon, published by Penguin Random House, takes the moon personally and not everybody can get away with that. The book was the lead review of the NY Times Book Review. AND it has been longlisted for the National Book Award — which is just stellar! Ok, lunar!

Nell Greenfieldboyce, Friend of LWON, just published Transient and Strange with W.W. Norton. It’s a book of startling science-adjacent essays, and not everybody can get away with that either. One essay began life as an LWON post about a spider at her window.

Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings, with Norton Press, is about his preoccupation — other than beavers — with the ecology of roadkill. The book is on 2023’s year-end-best lists of the New York Times, Kirkus, Science News, the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards. And in 2024, it won the Sierra Club’s Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing.

Cameron Walker’s new book, National Monuments of the USA, is for kids, and writing honestly about national monuments is a harder than you’d think.

Sally Adee’s new book, We Are Electric, published by Hachette Press, was glowed upon in a New York Times review which featured the phrase, “the long grass of some mightily weird modern research.”

Craig Child’s newest book is Tracing Time, published by Torrey House Press, about the rock art on his home Colorado Plateau.

One advantage of writing for free for LWON is that you can write about things that have triggered books or have fallen out of their research. So: Sarah’s seabirds, Sally’s bioelectricity, Craig’s rock art, Ben’s roadkill.