I took this picture the other day, and I have to admit, it’s a trick. For half a second, I thought I’d made some impossible discovery, the track of what looks to be a giant cat in ancient sandstone. With all the prehistoric tracks appearing lately — Ice Age humans in Utah, sloths in New […]
Miscellaneous
I’m late to the party when it comes to S-Town, the hit Serial Productions podcast about Alabama polymath John McLemore, who dies half way through the series having suffered mercury poisoning from years of back-woods chemical artisanship. It made me think about all of those passionate, brilliant people society never quite manages to harness, who […]
Bryn Nelson is a Seattle-based science writer whose book, Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure, came out September 13. Yes, that’s right–it’s a book about poop. So of course, Helen and Cameron wanted to take a deep dive into this important (seriously!) topic. Here’s our conversation with Bryn, which has been lightly edited […]
This essay originally appeared on LWON in 2012 as part of a series on the seven deadly sins. Since then, sociopathy hasn’t gone away, so we’re reposting it here. I wuz robbed. A few months ago a scientific discovery that I had covered in depth in my most recent book became the subject of a […]
“The English Riviera”. A phrase that sounds like a classic example of British acerbic humour, and I had already emotionally prepared myself to laugh despondently at the sight of some especially bleak industrial waterfront. But when I drove down to the South Coast of England, through hours of the most glorious “sunlit uplands” countryside you […]
A couple weeks ago, we were driving through Wyoming when I saw a sign for the Oregon Trail Cutoff. At this point we’d been in the car for something like four hours, and blessedly we were on some stretch of highway with reception, so I googled it. The cutoff, I learned, was the Lander Trail, […]
This piece is from a few years ago, and I’ll have you know I’m working steadily on a new book and continuing to shape my identity and dreaming of bottle-feeding goats in my next life. I continue to fret over the tribalism and the flies. I’m not sure what any of it means, but it’s […]
In shipping my grandfather’s 200-pound desk from my cousin in San Francisco to me in Ottawa, we found, too late, that Ottawa is devoid of bonded warehouses. This matters because customs can only be cleared for large objects like this through a warehouse bonded for such a purpose, and the nearest of these facilities is […]