If you were one of the 14 (a made-up number) people who read this back when LWON was publishing wonderful posts but was otherwise just a baby staggering around on inept little feet, we apologize for repeating ourselves. Anyway, you probably weren’t. One of the 14. Several superb posts on one of my favorite […]
This post was originally posted on 8/12/2010, so probably not everybody’s already read it and it’s really nice. I (Ann speaking) love Heather’s first story here, and I love her second one. I love the idea of people saying, “Come warm yourself by our fire.” Last summer, while roaming around Ecuador on a magazine […]
Even the dead kept watch. They sat upright in their graves, men and women, and faced the river, waiting, it seemed, for the waters to roil again with massive, steel-grey fish. The sturgeon, barbeled giants with rows of bony scutes down their backs, appeared each spring in Serbia’s Danube Gorge, after battling the current all […]
A few days ago, while I was out hiking in southern Arizona’s early morning heat with Jason De Leon and his students, I heard mention for the first time of Mexico’s Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. Our destination for the day was a small archaeological site hidden away in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, but De […]
If you were sitting in front of a computer in China right now, you wouldn’t be reading this. Nor would you have seen Cameron’s post about a snail invasion on Monday or Michelle’s piece yesterday on a poem inspired by Marie Curie. In fact, when you tried to open our website, your computer would have […]
Sometime in the winter of 1907 and 1908, an American researcher found a curious assortment of objects lying in a small pit in the Valley of the Kings. Theodore Davis, like many Egyptologists of the day, was looking for large, grand things, preferably royal tombs. So when he and his workers dug up several jars filled […]
A few years ago, one of my Scottish cousins decided to delve into the murky waters of family history. For a time, I received regular emails from him, dispatches containing faded photos of long-dead relatives; biographies pieced together from birth and death certificates, and short sad notes on the lives of the working poor in […]
In 1930, the legendary bartender Harry Craddock prescribed a popular cure for revellers who stumbled into London’s Savoy Hotel for breakfast and complained of throbbing hangovers. Craddock had fled Prohibition in the States in 1920 and found work at the American Bar in the Savoy, and he knew a thing or two about the ailments […]