This week, I was reading a story from a few years ago about what the last snow on earth might look like. Snow algae, which occur naturally in the snowpack, rise to the surface during the spring; when they emerge, they turn red. This “watermelon snow,” these days, could be seen as a warning. The […]
book review
The holidays — one of the few times of year when the decision to pick up a book should never be preceded with the question, “But have I finished All The Work?”. Today, the People of LWON pick up a tradition we started last year, providing a handy list of great reading. Erik Vance : […]
The People of LWON love to read. If we could orchestrate your holiday book binge, this is what it would look like: 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. […]
LWON is a group blog run semi-anarchically by 12 science writers. If you think that sounds like a recipe for chaos, just contemplate SciLance, an even more anarchic group of 35 science writers. Usually, SciLance is just a discussion group, so the chaos is relatively subdued. But last week, the writers of SciLance published their […]
I swear, I am not going to write exclusively about Mexico City. Really, I’m a science writer, not a travel writer. I swear it. But after my initial post, Christie sent me the book, Several Ways to Die in Mexico City, by Kurt Hollander and I just had to read it. At first, I was actually […]
Most scientists are reluctant to talk about “curing” mental illness, and rightly so. The mountain is too steep: These disorders have a range of genetic and environmental causes, and symptoms vary widely from person to person. But for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — in which people are haunted for months or years by memories of […]
Some of the characters of Thomas McMahon’s novel, Loving Little Egypt: Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make […]
I’m a keen reader of the New York Times Book Review, and thanks to the wonderful New York Public Library, I’m able to read bestsellers soon after they are published. However, I’ve often thought that old books – both the classics and the more obscure tomes that one finds tucked away in dusty old bookshops […]