December 11-15, 2017 This week on the Last Word on Nothing: Wildlife tracking can be a way both to keep data on charismatic megafauna like wolves and to involve the public in their individual stories, especially when your protagonist shares her name with a mafia-linked belly dancer, says Emma. Michelle has been looking into ways […]
Miscellaneous
The People of LWON have spoken. Here are the books you shall read this holiday season. For previous year’s reading recommendation lists, explore here (2016, 2015, 2014). Sarah G: Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann. By far the best literary nonfiction book I’ve ever read, and the most chilling. The Osage were […]
Around the winter solstice, this year and long into the future, celebrants will gather in large public venues for a special story. They’ll hear of robed men fighting to keep hope alive in the face of an empire’s persecution. They’ll hear a story of immaculate conception, of temptation and doubt, of a promise that a […]
Cagan H. Sekercioglu is one of those people who seem to have more hours in the day than you or I. A biologist who studies birds, mammals, butterflies and also has a sideline in wildlife photography, he divides his time between his native Turkey and the American West, where he is an professor at the […]
Happy 12th month, readers! Lurch with us into December with these fine offerings: On Monday Christie brought back a 2015 essay in which she reminds us that, sure, posting our most enviable moments for all to see is good fun, but it’s way less fun than the actual doing. “When we focus on the rendering,” […]
With International Human Rights Day coming up on Sunday, I’ve been thinking a lot about a Greek economist named Andreas Georgiou. In 2010, Georgiou was living in Maryland and working for the International Monetary Fund when he saw a call for applications for a job in Greece heading a new statistical agency. At that point, […]
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 disturbingly human about the shape of its […]
On a quiet summer evening in Brighton, Alison Pike was reading to her 9-year-old son the Roald Dahl children’s classic, Danny, Champion of the World—perhaps the most flattering portrayal of fatherhood in literature. Harry turned thoughtfully to his mother. “Sometimes I wish I had a dad,” he said, then paused. “But I’d rather have two […]
