One Voice, Many Vaccines

Twenty biomedical companies. Seventy nations. An aggressive search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines is underway worldwide. Yet even 21st-century technology can’t match one man who curbed a major influenza pandemic spreading across the United States in 1957.  Pioneering virologist Maurice Hilleman, now oft-forgotten, detected that pandemic from across the globe, convinced reluctant U.S. health officials […]

Clovis and the Virus

Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was […]

Guest Post: How to be alone

I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter, desperate for some fresh morsel of information: an update of confirmed case numbers (local, national, global), an official who said something […]

Making a Renaissance

This post is not implying a resemblance between the current pandemic and the perfect storm of disasters that hit Florence in the mid-1300s. Nor is it evidence for the half-assed notion that out of disaster comes good. It is only to say that sometimes beauty has deep roots. This first ran January 17, 2012. To […]

The Year Time Stood Still

I have somehow become involved in wholesale Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) procurement. That is not my job, and I know nothing about it, but the old rules no longer apply in this sudden new world. All it takes now, apparently, is to know some people with particular connections in China and all of a sudden […]

Notice: due to distraction, the People of LWON are posting only Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays. We’ll be back in strength in the foreseeable, we hope, and meanwhile wash your hands and socially distance because we love you.

A Note to Our Readers

Dear Readers of LWON, Like everyone else, the People of LWON are still adjusting to life with Covid-19, especially those with kids at home, parents at large, and full time jobs, remote and not. We’ll be posting less frequently for a while, but please keep coming to visit every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We’ll keep serving […]