Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants. After […]
Miscellaneous
December 2 – 6 This week, Cassie explored the freakonomic chain of events that leads from repurposed bednets to the rise of a perilous parasite. Roberta wondered why she can never quite remember what that e-book was about. Richard revealed the dirty secrets of astronomers: “the library is my telescope now.” Michelle introduced us to the […]
I received an email the other day from Nicholas Suntzeff, the director of the Astronomy Program at Texas A&M as well as a friend. (Readers might remember that he has published two guest posts with LWON.) His email was in fact a series of emails that he thought I might enjoy. It started with a […]
An estimated 73 percent of the People of LWON will be in a country that celebrates Thanksgiving today, and the remaining 27 percent are good-natured sorts, so we decided to dedicate today’s post to giving thanks. We’re writing about what we’re thankful for—and what gratitude says about us, about life on earth, about what we […]
If anything bolsters our instinctive revulsion to game-changing technology, it’s that so much of it makes us physically queasy. Much of our experienced technology involves sensory conflicts that inadvertently activate an ancient digestive reflex. Since the first mariner failed to find his sea legs, the story of human limit-pushing has been one big barf-fest. There’s […]
The news this past week that the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has fulfilled its mission by detecting neutrinos originating beyond the solar system reminds me of a story I once heard. I can’t reveal the source, though not out of a sense of journalistic responsibility. If anything, my discretion is due to journalistic irresponsibility: I don’t remember […]
November 18 – 22 Fairy tales have origins and evolutions, says Cameron, and were told so they’d produce “shock effects so powerful that to this day we feel compelled to talk about them, reinvent them and pass them on.” Helen goes to the zoo to see the tiger babies — “crashing and pouncing and falling off […]
Two decades of rock climbing and a career in writing have left me with two distinct things. One, an ability to step back from the world and make a careful assessment. A zen approach, if you will, to risk and making my way in this world. The second is a seriously messed up pair of […]
