This is your brain on the word “actually”

If you’re familiar with the internet, you know there’s a problem with the word “actually”. After initially gaining recognition in 2012 as “the worst word on the planet”, it quickly rose to an unpopularity stratospheric enough to justify think pieces in The New Republic and The Atlantic. Its ill repute transcends the English language: last year, […]

Project Purgatory, Or, My Life As a Retriever

I’m generally skeptical of the vast majority of things labeled as “self care” these days. Plenty of people have written about this, about how “self care” has become overrun with basic consumerism and aesthetically engineered Instagram posts rather than, you know, actually stuff that helps you care for yourself. So recently, when the The New […]

Fellowship: Dispatches from a real-time evolution lab

  Evolution, we are often reminded, conducts itself at a glacial pace. It throws its dice and picks its favorites over thousands of generations—plenty of time, we wearily explain, for a functional eye to develop. By the same slow token, this process, life’s old standby for adapting to new environments, will not be fast enough […]

Redux: In Visibility

This post originally appeared Dec. 17, 2017 On Tuesday, I texted my friend Michelle a brief video clip of a polar bear. The bear is starving, all jutting hips and elbows, its fur sparse except for a thatch along its spine and Clydesdale tufts around its plate-sized paws. As with any bear, there is something […]

Editor’s Note

Every week we’ve posted The Last Word, a quick summary of the week’s post.  This is our official notice that we’re not going to do that any more.  If you really want us to, we’ll consider doing it again.  If you want a weekly notice of LWON’s splendid posts, you could if you like sign […]

Neurowars

Last week, someone posted a notice for a new meetup on Twitter. A bit of news. A few of us have decided to do a Queer Neurodiversiry meet-up for coffee in San Francisco next Saturday, October 6th. Please join us and share with interested friends. Info in the FB event link. 🌈☕️ FB Event Link: […]

I Need A Hobby

Hello. My name is Rose. It’s nice to meet you. I am an adult woman with a moderately successful career, a set of friends I love, a dog that is very cute, and a relationship that functions quite well. I say all of this because what I’m about to admit feels very strange and might […]