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Guest Post: Wax Work
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...
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Bug Love Redux: The Ant-Man Diary
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...
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Bug Love Redux: Jumping Spiders in Love
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...
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Guest Post: Cuba’s Stories in Stone
Starting about 135 million years ago, long after the Pangea supercontinent fragmented into shards of planetary crust, one of those geological slivers began noodling toward the north and east. Near the...
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Guest Post: Rat Lab Summer
__________ Olivia Walch is a post-doc at the University of Michigan with a PhD in applied math. Her research involves mathematical modeling of biology and the development of mobile apps; most notably,...
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Guest Post: Fact-Checking: the Polar Bear Test
Everyone has an embarrassing moment on social media. For me, the most memorable started with an adorable photo of a baby polar bear. The bear had gleaming white fur, big brown eyes, and a sweet...
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Guest Post: Deep and Unspoken Hopes
With fewer than a dozen days left until Election Day, I’m having a hard time looking at the news. The blurzy noise of the past few months has become unbearable: polls, rigged elections, pantsuits,...
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Guest Post: On Walden Pond, On Election Day
After casting my ballot on Election Day, I took my two young daughters and my father, who was visiting from Wisconsin, to Walden Pond. It was a sunny fall day, unseasonably warm for November in...
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Guest Post: Filippiada, Faneromeni, Softex
I am in Greece right now, working on a series of stories about mental health in refugee camps. Yesterday I visited Softex, a military-run refugee camp outside Thessaloniki in Northern Greece where...
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Guest Post: The Philosopher’s Table
In the summer of 1968, my thirty-something parents bought a 48-inch-diameter round oak pedestal table from an antique furniture dealer in Union, N.J. The moment the table assumed its new position in...
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Guest Post: Scientists Come in All Sizes
I spent part of our recent snow day in New England on the phone talking to Richard Primack, an ecologist who studies how climate change affects seasonal events such as budburst and bird migration. I...
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Guest Post: Math Movie Music
Let’s be real: Watching someone doing math is only slightly more exciting than watching metal corrode. That may be why we’ve never seen a naturalistic depiction of math in the movies; such a snoozer...
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Guest Post: The Descent of the Testes
I did not plan to write about testicles this week. And I do not recommend plugging the phrase “elephant testicles” into Google’s image search engine. But I had a nagging question about the fierce...
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Redux Because This Is Better Than What I Was Going to Write
I had dinner the other night with, among others, a graphic designer. He said he liked looking at contemporary photographs but to be honest, he didn’t know why he liked looking at them. He knew they...
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Guest Post: The Baby Equinox and Charles Darwin
On this year’s summer solstice, the longest day, my daughter is about to reach her own personal equinox. She has lived outside of me for nine and a half months, almost as long as she spent swimming in...
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Guest Post: The Non-Simplicity of Mental Illness
ONE OCTOBER DAY in the fall of my junior year of college, I found myself sitting in a chair across from a small blond woman with a look of deep concern on her face as she stared into mine. She had...
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Guest Post: Begging Babies
Two birdfeeders hang from the deck of my house in the woods, a waystation for locals and migrants alike. They are a locus of activity — except when I forget to refill them. That happened again last...
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Guest Post: The Weight of the Eclipse
2017 was the year of the Great American Eclipse, and I live in its path. I also write about the Earth, moon, and sun for a living. So I was determined to not only cover the eclipse, but own it. Like...
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Guest Post: Finding My Moorings
When I was four or five years old, my parents took me on the Bluenose ferry, which traveled a narrow stretch of the Atlantic between Maine and Nova Scotia. I was enthralled at first, taking in the warm...
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Guest Post: Warm Feelings About the Void (A Rebuttal)
Last week Cassandra Willyard wrote that space bores her, and argued that astronomy writers need to highlight the human drama to hook her and other spacephobes. This is my response. This essay being one...
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