What can I say about Kate Horowitz, our newest LWON member, whose debut piece is about to drop on Monday? She’s insanely creative and smart, generous as can be, and has a truly unique voice that draws you in and holds you tight. She’s a science writer, essayist, and poet, for starters; I promise her […]
Miscellaneous
This week I received an email from an R&D engineer at Canada’s National Research Council. Hossein Babaei and his team in the Ocean, Coastal and River Engineering division have been doing computational modelling of the ways in which the ice in an ice road deforms under the tyres of slow-moving versus speeding trucks. They then […]
All weekend I’ve been trying to write an article about oak trees for a rapidly approaching deadline, and not making much headway. I know what the problem is: Oaks aren’t a story, they’re too branched and sprawling, and I still need a path to follow through the woodland, or an acorn for distractable squirrel readers […]
I‘d been thinking about this forever and wrote it up a while back, on January 17, 2012, back before 2020, before an endless pandemic; an ex-president who can’t give up power and a political reality that amounts to a second Civil War; and the natural disasters of hurricanes, floods, fires, and storms that are the […]
New York City was my forbidden fruit. It didn’t go with my identity as a nature writer, so I kept quiet about these urban forays. Wilderness trips I’d time so I’d get into the thick of humanity as swiftly as possible. After two weeks backpacking in the west end of the Grand Canyon, not using […]
I recently took an ultra-fun workshop run by the Queen of Shitty Robots, Simone Giertz. It’s the second of hers I’ve done, the first being a lightening round of Lego Mindstorm building to create robots that would then be raced against each other over the distance of one meter. This time, we were creating robot […]
(A poem for the evacuees. Pete and I are safe.) At the rummage sale at the end of the world, you don’t have to pay for anything. Strangers disgorge their closets for you: Dirty tennis shoes, used underwear, new dresses from Ann Taylor with the tags still attached. You rifle through the clothes, trying to ignore […]
The smoke startedwhile I was in the air.I first saw it,after my plane landed,as a video on my phone—a gold and gray billowjust two miles into the mountainsfrom the green propertywhere we lived.“Oh good, you’re home.You can help protect the housefrom the new wildfire,”my landlord texted, joking,but only half.