Two days after I moved with my family to the middle of Alaska I learned about the earthquakes. Every 15 minutes or so, monitoring stations in the state detect one. Most aren’t large, or even felt far beyond their epicenters. Some begin far out to sea and appear as barely more than a tiny spike […]
Miscellaneous
Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes. This instalment originally appeared in August 2017. Nothing says interstellar travel like a hibernation pod. The heroes of the 2016 holiday blockbuster Passengers, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, embark on a century-long journey to an planet […]
Erling Haaland, the cool Norwegian soccer player, has a pretty fun and slightly unhinged social media presence. During the World Cup, a clip from his Instagram account resurfaced where he claimed, “Just raw dogged a 7 hour flight. No phone, no sleep, no water, no food. Only map. #easy” I have a confession: I, too, […]
On May 10, I leave my house in northern Washington state just after dawn. I drive alone along a braided river, over sagebrush plateaus, and through fields of golden flowers. Then one plane across the Cascades, and another across the Rockies, to finally land in my my childhood home in Colorado. I’ve come to stand […]
Birds of the District of Columbia used to be a weird little secret at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, an exhibit I often had all to myself – a bunch of taxidermied birds in old-school wood and glass cases, lining the hallway around the basement auditorium. On a recent visit to the museum, […]
I’ve been yammering on here at LWON for long enough now that it’s time for readers to get to know me a little more intimately. That means some introductions are in order. We’ll start strong with my buddy Gus, the Skittle-size hemangioma spooning my liver. As you can imagine, this bundle of excess blood vessels […]
My mom watering her flowers as a wildfire approaches I’m helping my mom evacuate, the air getting harder to breathe in this charred perfume, 23 square miles of conifers and oakbrush gone up in flames several miles away. Last report, the fire was about to crest the ridge at 10,000 feet where the front line […]
I’ve been following Liz Dunn’s happiness research for a while, and now she has co-written a new book, Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species (Penguin Random House), about how joy could be the missing weapon in our fight against climate change. Here we sit down for a Q&A about her […]
