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 […]
Miscellaneous
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ever since I reviewed Ignorance: How it Drives Science, a charming new book by the Columbia neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, I’ve been thinking about ignorance. And I tell you, it’s been a bit of a headache. Firestein teaches a popular science class at Columbia, also called Ignorance, in which he invites scientists from different disciplines to talk […]
May 21 – 25 This week was LWON’s second birthday. To celebrate, we rounded up some of our favorite comments of the past year and threw them a little party. Cameron told us why abalone are like Neil Gaiman, just putting his ideas out there, never knowing what would be read, what someone might respond […]
