The People of LWON and their splendid guests have several ongoing preoccupations, and rather than have you try to mentally collate them over the years, we thought we’d devote a week to each preoccupation. That way they’ll all be in one place. I have a feeling this isn’t making much sense. However. This week is devoted to redux posts on loving bugs.
This is one of my all-time favorite LWON posts. Guest Brooke Borel is a curious science writer with a deadline, naturally looking for something else to do, finds ants in her kitchen. The result is a Norse epic, a Greek tragedy, an Ibsen play, a story of love and loss, of fall and redemption, and a sudden descent into madness. With video, diagram, and pictures. Just go read it.
It was another awesome week on LWON. At least we think so.
I took my place at the gray table in the gray, poorly-lit room, meeting the gaze of the eyeless skull staked upright before me. A stiff rectangular block of white wax was my only material, and a simple metal implement, sharp like a scalpel on one end and rounded like a spoon on the other, my only tool—other than my own hands and head, once full of vertebrate anatomy knowledge, now less so. To my right, another student, a painter, ripped wax from his block and manipulated it. My weak hands couldn’t get a grip.
Something about the way a river trip starts. Gear gets thrown in, arranged, tied down, and when the current picks up and carries you downstream, your sense of time and distance immediately changes. Connection to the other 7 billion or so people on the planet loosens, and connection to something bigger, and in ways smaller, more intimate, takes hold.
