I wrote this post in 2019, and am still gobsmacked by flower hormones. Last November, my mother gave me several crumpled paper bags full of flower bulbs for my birthday. Daffodils, hyacinths, snowdrops, paperwhites — the bulbs promised frilly, fragrant bounty and I couldn’t wait to plant them. Then life got hectic. The bags sat in a […]
Miscellaneous
I was having an email exchange with a longtime friend a few months ago, and we got to talking about our long-ago youth—specifically, the workplace where we met, when we were both in our teens. As is often the case in these late-evening conversations, the discussion turned to the subject of who else among us […]
I saw a bucket of yeast at the brewery last week and I thought it looked like joy. Not because beer is delicious (though it is), but because it could not be contained. As the beer fermented in a giant tank, the yeast dribbled from a pipe into the five-gallon bucket, bubbled and pulsed like […]
Yesterday I was interviewed about the Finkbeiner Test for the Change Artist Podcast (episode will go live at a later date). While gathering up some links to share, I realized that it was exactly ten years ago — January 17, 2013 — that Ann wrote the LWON post that would become the world-renowned Finkbeiner Test. […]
My wife pieced together a kill in our driveway, sending me pictures of deer tracks posed in a casual walk followed by a sprawl, deer fur in the snow, and faint signs of melt, a couple hours old at most. The next picture was of cat tracks the size of an adult human palm, a […]
First: what is an idea? Its physical manifestation must be some clump of brain cells activating in some very specific pattern, but the result feels like something more. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert describes ideas as beings that travel from person to person, bestowing their gifts upon an individual. She describes an idea she had […]
Madeline Ostrander is a passionate and talented science journalist and a good friend. Her must-read book At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth is on shelves now. KATE: What initially sparked this project for you? MADELINE: Like most people who’ve been writing about climate change for a long time, I’ve […]
On the eve of 1942, Winston Churchill was in Ottawa on a Zelenskyy-style rally-the-allies speech in the Canadian parliament before the next “invasion season” of WWII was to arrive, having come straight from doing the same in America (you can watch the speech here, known best by its closing line, ‘some chicken, some neck’). He […]