Two years ago this week, a well-known environmental organizer named Sombath Somphone was detained at a traffic stop in downtown Vientiane, Laos, and driven away in a white pickup. He has not been seen or heard from since. You can read a lot more about Somphone, his work in Laos, and his wife’s remarkable efforts to […]
Miscellaneous
Christie tells Ira Glass a story that ends up on the cutting room floor. Now, listening to the hit podcast Serial, Christie gets why. Each personal story has to fit the larger mission of the show. “I was only capable of telling my story from inside the moment — with details that gave away the punchline before […]
Last year, I told a story for This American Life (TAL), my favorite radio show. My story was about being so lost in grief over my sister-in-law’s death from cancer that I mistook a pizza delivery guy for an undertaker. My error wasn’t as ridiculous as it seems. The pizza guy had the wrong house, […]
* Yesterday, Cameron wrote another one of her beautiful essays that make you remember how nice it is to be alive. Or, (in her words), once again she’s vomiting rainbows. “You’re going to have to forgive us our shouting about Europe for now,” says guest poster Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at University of Oxford, in the wake of […]
It was a week of thanks and turkeys. Scientists and editors claim not to like anthropomorphizing, but Ann did it anyway. With galaxies. Which breathe. No, really! Guest Nell Greenfieldboyce watched a spider go about its business in her window for weeks, then wrote about it, and it’s lovely. Those pronouncements on climate change? They […]
Dear Readers: Writing down our thoughts and feelings is pretty normal for the People of LWON. We’ve even written our thanks before. But this year for Thanksgiving, we wrote our thanks on paper. With our hands. Whoa. Click each image to enlarge. And to you, Dear Reader: Thank you for reading us. Love, The […]
Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with an even firmer stance on current environmental affairs, including reams of new data from more scientists saying, basically, news is not good. The New York Times called it “the starkest warning yet.” Little new was revealed in the report, rather it deepened the […]
A week with the winter coming, a week with some excellent words. Guest Colin Norman started the week with his final post in his thorough, smart, and elegant series, Affair of the Heart. He’s been through the medical system and come out the other side, more or less intact, certainly better than when he went in. Now, […]
