This past weekend, I climbed Glacier Peak with a friend of mine. Glacier Peak is Washington’s fourth-highest mountain, and also one of the state’s five stratovolcanoes. (Perhaps you’ve heard of one of the others; I know I have.) What distinguishes Glacier Peak among its volcanic kin is its remoteness. It is at the eastern edge […]
Miscellaneous
My 16-year-old is leaving alone for a month of language school in Tokyo. Being born and raised outside of towns under population 700, closer to 300 in some cases, should put a dizzying spin on the experience. We’ve had epic urban adventures together, but not off this continent, certainly not in the vast compression of […]
My best friend lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Despite meeting her over Zoom every Saturday since 2018, I’ve only seen her in person a handful of times. So when she came to visit me this Spring we decided to do something deeply silly to celebrate. Ottawa is not known for its high sophistication, but we do, […]
If you have been at LWON for a while, you might have noticed that I post this one every year–because somehow, once again, it is June. And once again, it is gloomy. But things have been extra-cloudy this year, and people who don’t live in California have noticed! I mean, the Washington Post was even […]
For the last two years I’ve been working on a book about dogs. Dog intelligence, in particular. When I started on it, I kind of wondered what I could possibly say that hasn’t been said. I mean, there are A LOT of dog books out there already, many of them dealing with cognition at least […]
A version of this essay originally appeared June 15, 2012, as part of this site’s Father’s Day series. In the final paragraph I’ve updated one temporal reference (“two weeks ago yesterday” to “May 31, 2012”) and added one recent personal development. “My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.” The line has always […]
The other day, I had to take everything off a bookshelf I replaced, and I had to move one of my oldest possessions: A beautiful, unkempt houseplant of indeterminate background. It has been on a high shelf most of the time I’ve had it, and even before that. My husband rescued it from the upper […]
I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad. I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? […]
