On September 30, the Rosetta orbiter will make a controlled collision with Comet 67P/C-G. It is not designed for landing, so this is the last we will hear from it. This date also marks an end to a happy period for my family that started in 2013 when my son was just four years old […]
Miscellaneous
Sombath Somphone, a respected civil-society leader in Laos, was abducted in Vientiane in December 2012 and has not been seen since. As President Obama becomes the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos, we revisit this post about Somphone, his disappearance, and a long-ago turning point in his life. Two years ago this week, a […]
August 29 – September 2, 2016 Journeys bookend this week, while the middle was filled with grief and change, which are journeys of their own. On Monday, Sarah takes us to the rivers of British Columbia and the mysteries that bubble around and through them. It was as if the country itself murmured just beyond the edge […]
Several times in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself driving Highway 101 from Santa Barbara to Berkeley, a 320-mile route. The trip starts out along the ocean, then dips in and out of oak-dotted hills. Later, the road slices through the Salinas Valley and then into Silicon Valley. The last part is my least favorite—the […]
Maybe we were delirious. It was after two in the morning and I had my kids out on the street in Manhattan. With how hot August was, we tried to stay out late, taking advantage of cooler nighttime temperatures. This was our eighth night knocking around the city, urban exploration I called it, an extracurricular crash course […]
August 22-26 This week several LWONians had kids on the brain. Guest poster Divya Abhat wondered how to curb her kid’s screen time . . . and her own. Erik waxed nostalgic about the good old days, when packing for an adventure involved grabbing a fistful of carabiners, not a fistful of diapers. And I scanned my daughter’s junk-food-filled daycare menu and […]
Earlier this month my daughter turned one. She spent nine months inside of me, and since she’s been on the outside I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what goes into her body. As a newborn, she nursed until my nipples bled because “breast is best!” And when she was away from me, I pumped so […]
On August 12th, a story entitled “The Death of the Bering Strait Theory” opened thus: “Two new studies have now, finally, put an end to the long-held theory that the Americas were populated by ancient peoples who walked across the Bering Strait land-bridge from Asia approximately 15,000 years ago.” The History Channel posted along the same lines: […]