In the Egyptian wing of the Brooklyn Museum my young son stands before a beautiful coffin containing the body of woman named Gautseshenu. Her name means “bouquet of lotuses,” though neither of us can pronounce it. After a couple bumbling tries we stop, me out of embarrassment and him because her name is not the […]
Miscellaneous
This first ran September 24, 2015; since then I have stopped going to that coffeeshop and no longer see Larry and John, its chief scientists, and in fact I hardly remember what they looked like and the coffeeshop moved anyway. Time is an illusion, you say? not when so much stuff undeniably happens in it; […]
I’m so happy to see these guys year after year, so I’m celebrating them again here on LWON.I don’t know why this came out in “verse,” but here it is. I’m no poet, but I had fun regardless. And if you read it right, it really does scan! Upon my feeder yesterdayA cowbird male did […]
It’s summer, and I’ve been thinking of what poet Billy Collins called those, “forlorn chairs/though at one time it must have seemed/a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.” Even situated, as they usually are, to take in the view, it’s hard for those chairs to compete with the attention-grabbing distractions found on our […]
This post from years back still makes me smile. I hope you’ll also enjoy it again! Not every juicy morsel works in every recipe. As a writer, I often come across something meaty, think, HUH! and then drag the link to a rarely visited desktop folder because, you know, I’m not writing a piece about […]
Almost every night since late February I’ve slept on our deck, watching the star-scape creep westward month by month. Scorpius recently came out of hiding and now the great space scorpion is standing on its tail in the middle of the southern sky. Jupiter has been sailing toward the evening glory of Venus, Power and […]
This post first ran in the early days of the pandemic. There are some parts of the silence that I miss. But today, I am working in the back room of an elementary school as the “adult on site” during a camp run by high school students. There is singing and shrieking and laughter and […]
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to […]
