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 […]

Migrants

Three weeks and approximately two lifetimes ago, I went to Rock Springs, Wyoming to meet some migrants. The pilgrims in question were mule deer, a whole herd of ‘em, who trek each spring from the sere sagebrush valley where they winter to alpine summer pastures, devouring fresh green-up as they wander. Along the way they […]

The trolley and the psychopath

This post first appeared March 27, 2015. It’s not irrelevant March 25, 2020. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A trolley carrying five school children is headed for a cliff. You happen to be standing at the switch, and you could save their lives by diverting the trolley to another track. But there he […]