July 2 – 6 This week, Tom wondered why one of the greatest mental capacities our outrageously successful species possesses hardly works at all. Faced with parenting in a region “where a high school diploma confers a solid elementary school education”, Jessa weighed her home schooling options and whether they could guarantee a prodigy. Cassie’s […]
Miscellaneous
Marriage is like a sweater. A yellow sweater you bought, and couldn’t return. So says Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, and one of the 20 outrageously accomplished behavioral scientists who spoke at a 1-day summit at Stanford last week. Gilbert studies happiness, not knitwear. And his main point is that we humans are terrible […]
Sally, who usually posts the week-end summary, had a massive failure of an unspecified nature. And Ann, who does the backups, had a massive failure of modern conveniences due to excessive heat and no power for the foreseeable. We’re sorry. We doubt that this concatenation will happen again.
June 8, 2012, Cedaredge Colorado—It was an ordinary Friday afternoon. I was at my desk writing when I looked out the window and saw an enormous plume of smoke billowing from the back of our property. It was the kind of moment when you’re supposed to remain calm and remember all the wise things you […]
June 18 – June 22 “Don’t expect to get a penis every Friday, because you won’t.” Thus spake Cassandra, introducing occasional penis Fridays, a new LWON effort, so to speak. The introductory post in the series concerned banana slug sex, which is even grosser than the sum of its parts, and that’s saying a lot. […]
A Northern engineer once wrote that if you want to build a house in the Arctic, place a window overlooking every direction from which a bear might come and a door on the opposite side. Architecture, due to the immovable nature of its products, should be one of the most locally-attuned disciplines in the professional […]
June 10 – June 15 This week we celebrated Father’s Day, and because LWON has too many ladies and not enough mens, we brought in some hired muscle to create some menspace. Assuming the role of temporary dude, I started the week wondering about the generational echoes of missing fathers. Guest poster Greg Hanscom showed […]
“My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.” The line has always gotten laughs. It comes at a point in my public talks when I want to convey how comically recent is our current understanding of the universe—so recent that people who were present at the creation still walk among us. I’ve never thought […]
