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Guest Post: Outmoded Diseases: Pleurisy
Have you ever read a book where someone had pleurisy, or gout, or hysteria, and wondered…how come I never hear about anybody getting that anymore? Well, you’re in luck: It’s Outmoded Diseases Week at...
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Guest Post: The Hidden Rites of Spring
On Easter Sunday, between watching videos of puppies frolicking with bunnies and helping neighbor kids hunt for backyard eggs, I spent some time puzzling over the crypto-pagan religious festivals of...
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Guest Post: When Worlds Collide
Several years ago, on a brisk spring day in the wild reaches of northeastern Arizona, I was helping an elderly grandmother scrape kernels off a bushel’s worth of dried corn cobs. She spoke no English...
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Redux: What Luis Alvarez Did
This post originally ran on November 11, 2013. I rerun it now partly because I liked it and mostly because it’s a conversation with Hope Jahren and Ben Lillie. Hope has a new book out, written with her...
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Learning to Talk All Over Again
This is the first in a series of posts about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally. Guest Veronique Greenwood begins at the pro level, with Chinese. The character for...
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Shop Owner! Bring Me a Sheet of Table!
This is the second in a series of posts about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally. Guest Veronique Greenwood begins at the pro level, with Chinese. The character for...
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All the Chinese You Need to Take a Shower
This is the third and final post in a series about learning a foreign language long past the age when it comes naturally (if you missed the earlier posts, you can find them here: part 1, part 2) ....
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Guest Post: Water in Yomibato
Alejo with his arrows, just in case. (c) Glenn Shepard Last November, I went to the Peruvian Amazon on assignment for National Geographic. (The story is out today). I focused on a group of indigenous...
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Guest Post: Pip, Part Two
(Pip too big for jar) One year ago I rescued a one-eyed tiny frog, a spring peeper, from my pool. Since then I have gone to lengths to not only keep it alive, but also to try and make it happy, as if...
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Guest Post: Moire in the Wild
My first sighting of one of life’s everyday astonishments was as a little fellow in the 1960s, sitting unbuckled in the back seat of my family’s ’57 Chevy. Whenever we hit the highway on our way to...
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Guest Post: When Everything Good Is Also Beautiful
For the better part of 30 years, my head was firmly stuck in English. But when I moved to Italy three years ago, I also started my first genuine effort at picking up a second language. My barely...
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Guest Post: A Mathy Mechanism for Solving a Problem Like The Donald
Over the last several years, Harvard economist Eric Maskin has been delivering a talk asking: “How Should We Elect Presidents?” Should the candidate with the most votes win? Not necessarily, according...
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Guest Post: Ode to a Gay Bar
Let me tell you a story. In the summer of 1991, when I was 21 years old, I worked in a genetics lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. I wasn’t yet out, but had heard about a popular gay bar...
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Snark Week: Guest Post: Warning: A Slow and Silent Menace in the Trees
This is the first post in LWON‘s 4,729th annual Snark Week, a tribute to the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, filled with what we hope is an equal amount of truthfulness, credibility, and creativity....
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Redux: Nell on Paper Clips
This week at LWON we’re digging into the archives to celebrate the uncelebrated: inanimate objects. Many of them aren’t very impressive inanimate objects. And yet we love them. In December 2014 Nell...
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Redux: Anne Sasso has a stand-up calculator
It is Thing Appreciation Week at LWON, where we bring you the Greatest Hits of our previous posts about inanimate objects. Anne Sasso wrote this post in January of last year celebrating her pocket...
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Guest Post: Swimming in the Charles
The hot, thick summer air in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can make you feel like you’re sitting in a sauna, wrapped in a soaking-wet wool blanket. As a recent, temporary transplant, staying in a house...
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HOT: Guest Post: Counting Star Swirls
At three o’clock on Friday morning, August 12, I dragged my husband out of bed to go see shooting stars. I suspected it would be a hard sell. We live too close to the city to view all but the most...
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Redux: I’ll Miss You Summer
Damn you, carefree summer, for being such a fleeting thing! Trading you in for homework and sports practice and band performances…the season of school and tight schedules can be hard on bodies and...
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Guest Post: Lost Amid the Smartness
At least once a week, my almost three-year-old and I will wander through the “100 aker wood” with Winnie-the-Pooh and friends in search of heffalumps and woozles. At some point — a voice (mine) — will...
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