Fatherhood: Trying to Raise a Tomboy Princess

A while back, I was giving my three-year-old daughter, Brynn, a bath when she laid back in the tub and announced, “Look, Daddy, I’m a princess!” When I asked what that meant, she replied that it was her job to just lounge around until some prince (any prince would do) came along to save her. […]

Fatherhood: The Outline of a Man

A framed photo of a man hung in my grandmother’s bedroom until the day she died. He had a receding hairline over a long forehead over a strong, sweet face. His name was Hans Rudolf Weiss and he was Charlotte’s husband and the father of her three children. His picture went with her through six […]

The Last Word

June 4- June 8 This week, Cameron explains about the long history of complaining about the gloomy weather in Southern California. Guest poster and Cassie’s man Soren Wheeler took on the phrase “dumbing down” as it is routinely dispensed by scientists tired of science journalism: “The implication is that if you need those things to […]

June Gloom

I used to think the weather was something adults talked about because they were boring. And now that’s me, commiserating with neighbors about the state of our sky, which gave us a glorious, bluebird May and then rolled out a thick cloud carpet on the first day of June. June Gloom isn’t just a Southern […]

Portrait of the Archaeologist as Young Artist

On the taxi ride there, I felt a little ill. The long, sleepless flight to Lima, a dodgy lunch that was coming back to haunt me, and the abrupt swerving and lurching of the taxi through the congested streets of the Peruvian capital—all seemed to be taking their toll.  By the time I and my […]

Stare Down

In all my obsessive reading about combat sport – the ghost-written memoirs and swaggering comment threads – one concept has always stumped me. Time and again a story of a fight takes as its pivotal moment the breaking of a fighter’s will. Or take this account: “I was beating him up, but I don’t think […]

The Last Word

It was a usual week at LWON:  questions and opinions shot off like bottle rockets, unexpectedly and in all directions. Virginia gets on the phone to interview neuroscientists and realizes that most of them are men.  Then she gets on the phone about a hot new neuroscience and realizes that almost-most of her interviewees are […]