This past summer, an ecologist named Erik Beever sent me a new paper he’d published on a class of critters you might call charismatic invaders: introduced species that are at once ecologically disastrous and deeply beloved. Erik and his coauthors offered a few examples, some you’ve heard of — like wild horses — and some […]
Miscellaneous
As we entered the third decade of the third millennium, many of the science and tech words and phrases in popular circulation had lost all meaning. “AI”, “machine learning” and their newer synonym, “cognitive technology”, for example, had joined the pantheon of synonyms for “snake oil“. Or at least they were becoming placeholders for anything […]
By the time you read this post, 2020 will have already arrived at the South Pole. Even if you read it the instant it pops up on the Internet, at 7 a.m. EST December 31, 2019, the New Year will already be an hour old. You don’t have to go to the South Pole to […]
Yesterday, I took a walk in the winter desert where snow on sandstone melted and filled dishes eroded into rock. A common local name for these shallow catchments, just enough to drink, is waterpocket. You’ll also hear kissing pool. That’s how you access them, down on your knees, lips touching the surface. Water conveys itself […]
This post originally ran October 30, 2017 Sand blowing and grains hurdling over each other, landing and knocking the next, is called saltation. This is how dunes move, not sheering chaos, but each grain effecting the other, billiard balls knocking each other down the line. Kids found that if they stood on a dune crest, […]
Our first love may have been the written word, but the People of LWON are also avid watchers of film and television. Here’s what has been flickering across our screens this year: Jessa: My most moving television experience of 2019 has been the BBC and HBO co-production Years and Years. The inciting incident is that […]
This post appeared about a year ago, when I first joined LWON. I’m reposting it now because the Boschian horror that is ice skating season has crept up on me again, and I still don’t have disability insurance. “This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink […]
We’ve reached the end of another trip around the sun, which means Twitter is chockablock with year-end round-ups — here’s what I wrote, read, accomplished, etcetera — a phenomenon that generally leaves me feeling like a feckless, uncultured slacker. This December, though, I’ve resolved to celebrate my experiences rather than wallow in retrospective regret. For […]