Holiday Redux: The Beauty of Punctuation

By: | December 26, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in November 2013.

Comma butterfly

Several years ago, I splurged on a gorgeous red hardcover edition of Strunk and White’s classic book on writing, The Elements of Style. Illustrated by Maira Kalman, the pages are filled with fanciful depictions of punctuation and grammar rules. To demonstrate the use of the apostrophe in the phrase “Somebody else’s umbrella,” Kalman drew a pensive lady dressed in yellow gazing up at a pink umbrella (with, appropriately enough, an apostrophe-shaped handle). For the dash—my favourite form of punctuation—the illustration shows a towzled man in striped pajamas, accompanied by the caption “His first thought on getting out of bed—if he had any thought at all—was to get back in again.”

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The Question Mark butterfly.

Recently, I came across another form of punctuation art: The curious markings on butterflies. Some species in the genus Polygonia sport a comma on the underside of their wing. Another species, called the Question Mark (Polygonia interrogationis), displays a quizzical crescent and dot. And enthusiasts have spotted other punctuation marks; one posted a snapshot taken in Spain with the question “First ever sighting of the semi-colon butterfly?”, and another photographer captured what appeared to be a colon on a butterfly in Staffordshire, England.* Continue reading →

Holiday Redux: I Can’t Put It Down

By: | December 25, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in July 2012.

Alarmist reporting about addictions to sex, to the internet or to exercise can suggest that new syndromes are being invented every day, that human existence is pathologized out of proportion. But some compulsive behaviors that caused concern centuries ago continue to affect people today, and the sufferers have trouble getting anyone to take their problems seriously.

Men and women book readers, who get up in the morning and go to bed in the evening with a book in their hand, who sit down at the table with it, who put it next to them at work, carry it with them on walks, and who cannot separate themselves from it, until they have finished reading it. But they have hardly devoured the last page of a book, they are already greedily eyeing up, where they might get the next one from […] and devour it with a voracious appetite. No smoker, coffee-friend, wine-drinker, gambler could be so addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee table than many a book-hungry reader is to his reading.

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Holiday Redux: The Hidden Carols of England

By: | December 24, 2014

LWON is celebrating the holidays by re-running some of our favorite posts. This post originally appeared in January 2014, and I thought it would be nice to give it another outing during the holidays.

While Shepherds Watched

People have been singing Christmas carols in the pubs in villages around Sheffield, in the north of England, for hundreds of years. They sing week after week and year after year. Each pub has a season; in one, Christmas carols start on November 11 and continue until the first Sunday after Christmas. Every Sunday afternoon, people pack into a pub and sing together.

On Tuesday folklorist Ian Russell gave a lecture at the Library of Congress about his work on what he calls the “hidden” carols of northern England, particularly those Sheffield pubs. Russell is the director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He’s been studying folk traditions in South Yorkshire—which includes Sheffield—and North Derbyshire for 40 years.

A pub carol sing isn’t a religious occasion. It’s secular caroling. There’s beer. Sure, they sing about the Messiah’s birth and Mary and so on, but the point of being there, Russell says, is the community. People go out of a sense of commitment to the group and to the tradition. You do it every year because you do it every year.

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Read This

By: | December 23, 2014

The People of LWON love to read. If we could orchestrate your holiday book binge, this is what it would look like:shutterstock_94677988

JESSA

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi: This is hardly a buried treasure — it won the Hugo award — but it’s quite simply the best science fiction I’ve read in my adult life. Set in future Thailand, its characters brave the other side of whatever planetary crisis we’re about to put ourselves through. This novel is, emphatically, for adults (sexual violence is treated appropriately but figures prominently).

ERIK

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart: A wonderful look at New York in an imagined near future where the country has taken its obsession with social media and youth to a logical (if extreme) conclusion. It’s about a sort of pathetic schlub trying to negotiate the collapse of the United States into a brave new corporate world. Easy to read, hard not to think about for months afterward. It will also inject a new adjective in your life – “Oh my God, I love your friend, he is soooo media.”

CHRISTIE

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison: “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion…,” Jamison writes in the opening chapter of this mesmerizing book of essays. She tackles difficult issues ranging from abortion to assault on a deeply personal level. The essay about Morgellons should be required reading for every health journalist.

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Watch This

By: | December 22, 2014

One of the greatest gifts the holidays bring is a brief window of uninterrupted time — just enough to lose oneself in a book or a TV series, guilt free. Today we offer up our recommendations for things to watch this year.shutterstock_163475036

Jessa:

To Be and To Have (Être et avoir)

A documentary crew installs itself in a one-room schoolhouse in France for a full school year, just before the (masterful) teacher retires. Beautiful, sweet film with good thoughts about teaching.

Christie:

Black Mirror

This British TV series explores our obsessions with the screens we spend so much time these days looking into, and what these fixations reveal about us. Each episode represents a standalone story, but that doesn’t mean you won’t want to binge watch. The first season kicks off with a story about how social media and instant updates shape news and political events. Also, whether a British Prime minister should engage in a sex act with a pig to save a princess. (I’m not giving anything away, really.)

Erik:

Vikings

Ostensibly based on (or inspired by, or cross-marketed with) the rather thick, yet popular 2009 Robert Ferguson book, The Vikings. Now, viking fans online are fond of trashing the series because it takes some liberties. Having slogged through (much of) Ferguson’s book, which is well-informed but dense, I think the series does a great job of making arcane archeology come alive. For instance, the first season shows a viking burial, complete with human sacrifice. While many details are different from the book, it gets the context right and really shows you what such an event would feel like. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | December 20, 2014

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December 14-19, 2014

In the second half of Ann’s reflections on Marvin “Murph” Goldberger, the subject turns from academic life to Jason, the group of physicists who advised the US government on science, including tactics to be used in the Vietnam War. As before, she lets Murph do the talking.

Press release-driven science journalism is lazy and inherently flawed, argues our guest Stephanie Paige Ogburn. The motivations of those who write them are at odds with the goals of journalism, and the public deserves proper beat reporting in context, rather than study stories.

One of the great and trivial mysteries of life is the fate of those small items – ballpoint pens, elastics and paperclips – that we rarely intentionally throw out, but which disappear all the same. Somewhere out there is a paperclip sink, we muse, a person with an ever-growing wealth of these vanishing microtools. Her name is Nell Greenfieldboyce.

Cassie presents an astoundingly accurate account of the working practices of professional science writers. Highlights include the conveniently ambiguous nature of deadlines in a globalized industry, the fortifying powers of a bra, and crucial steps such as, “Go to the kitchen. Eat all the things.”

Finally, Michelle leads us into some weekend feature reading with a story about abducted Laotian environmental organizer Sombath Somphone. She invests us irretrievably in the man as a young, striving high school student who earned the support of his English teacher and paid the opportunities back in hard work back home.

 

Image: JF Sebastian, via Flickr

The Long Legacy of a Good Deed

By: | December 19, 2014

7407963894_a9b4d51976_zTwo years ago this week, a well-known environmental organizer named Sombath Somphone was detained at a traffic stop in downtown Vientiane, Laos, and driven away in a white pickup. He has not been seen or heard from since. You can read a lot more about Somphone, his work in Laos, and his wife’s remarkable efforts to call his abductors to account in my story for National Geographic. 

Right now, though, I’d like to tell you a story about his high-school English teacher.

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How to Write a Science Feature

By: | December 18, 2014

drawing1. Write late at night, preferably the night before your deadline. That’s when the creative juices will really be churning. Your gut will be churning too. With panic.

2. Don’t write the whole piece in one fell swoop. Focus on a single sentence. Make sure that sentence is perfect before you move on to the next. Never mind that the entire paragraph may eventually be trashed. This. Sentence. Must. Be. Perfect. Agonize over it. Erase it. Try again. Get frustrated. Check Facebook. Maybe one of your writer friends has posted something on her newsfeed that will help you crack this goddamned sentence. Nope. No helpful hints. But here’s a video of a bunny chasing a cat. Adorable! Maybe you’d like to own a bunny. Research how to litter box train a rabbit.

3. Now it’s 1am. Time to really get serious. Go downstairs and make a cup of tea. Choose Tazo Focus tea for obvious reasons. Discover that the tea’s name is nothing but an empty promise. Continue reading →