The Round of Introductions You Didn’t Ask For

By: | July 31, 2026

I’ve been yammering on here at LWON for long enough now that it’s time for readers to get to know me a little more intimately. That means some introductions are in order.

We’ll start strong with my buddy Gus, the Skittle-size hemangioma spooning my liver. As you can imagine, this bundle of excess blood vessels gave me a little scare the first time we met via CT scan, but now we’re pals; I can count on him to be there for the rest of my days.

Next up is Clint, my left-ear dehiscence. He showed up during fetal development, or should I say he missed our scheduled meeting, leaving a gap where parts should have come together. As a result, my left ear forever feels full, it clicks and hisses at me, and sometimes my breathing is disturbingly loud in my own head. I get momentary dizzy spells, too. Patching up Clint would require drilling into my skull beneath my ear, so I’ll be living with this developmental blip for the duration.

Then there’s Betty and the [Bloody] Dozen, my lung node and 12 blood clots that appeared ensemble two years ago, putting me on the fast track to the ER! Betty appears to have tucked in for the long haul—maintaining her girlish figure, thankfully—but the Dozen had to go before they sent me to Stroketown. A little pill that blocks clotting factor Xa did the trick, but I have to keep taking it forever and I’m not allowed to bump my head ever again.

Emmet sits left of center between my eyes, seeming more scar than wrinkle, but I have no memory of an injury there. I’m not sure how he got so deep or why the other one in my “eleven” is much shorter and shallower. Not that symmetry has ever been my thing. I’m unbalanced in lots of ways; just ask my husband. Anyway, Emmet might meet a needle full of Botox someday. We’ll see.

Cybil is the chin scar reminding me of my decades-ago fancy footwork at the ice rink, which ended that one time when I went down harder than usual. A lesson from that day: If you must injure your chin, doing it on ice is super efficient from a first-aid perspective. Regardless, seven stitches led to Cybil’s emergence, and she’s refused to fade away.

Which leads to Finn, my most persistent chin hair—oddly, rooted in Cybil. He enjoys growing to at least an inch before making himself known. I don’t know how he does it.  One day he’s not there and then suddenly, there’s Finn, long as a blade of grass, making a scene. (The one benefit of losing one’s eyesight with age? No more Finn. I may be drawing on my eyebrows with lipstick, but soon Finn will be a distant memory.)

I kindly call my one droopy eye Grace; she’s very self-conscious. Most of the time she’s not that noticeable unless you know to look for her. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned her at all.

Skeeter is my left-eye floater. Irritating as hell, that one. He arrived with great fanfare—flashing lights and dizziness! Now it’s just him, that buggy speck that try as I might I can’t pin down. My swatting him away is fruitless. Doc says there are more to come so settle in.

My cowlick, top left, I call Rinske the temptress. I have nearly mastered the comb-over that keeps her modest, but sometimes she shows a little extra skin and I’m forced to put a clip in her. She hates that.

Omar is the brown mole on the cartilage in my right ear, and Omar requires constant monitoring because he’s extremely ambitious. I tell him I like him just the way he is. Regularly I say to him, “Omar? Don’t go changin.” So far so good.

They don’t have individual names, but periodic white “hotdog spots” mottle my arms and legs. I’m not sure if they’re a fungus or signs of an autoimmune skin condition, but I think of them as bits of gristle in the meat of my extremities and I do admire how they pop against sun-kissed skin.

I have a soft spot for Boris the spider vein.

What to call the cherry angiomas, other than a fabulous band name? You tell me.

I think that’s enough for now, don’t you? The skin tabs (Blimpy, Gilgamesh, and Ray) and the most unflappable of warts (the Hydra) can wait until another day. Also, be ready for Pip, the tiny bead of flesh at the center of my belly button, who is sort of adorable, if I may.

Here’s the thing. In my experience, especially for the bits of ourselves we are least fond of or that threaten to do us harm, giving them names seems to take some of their power away. They’re just the little frenemies our moms made us be nice to because, after all, they’re family. You can’t pick ‘em, so name ‘em and give ‘em some love.

Until next time, may your body, like mine, keep accessorizing, and may your next crusty addition answer to Stimpy McGee.

Photo from Unsplash.

One Damn Thing After Another

By: | July 29, 2026

My mom watering her flowers as a wildfire approaches

I’m helping my mom evacuate, the air getting harder to breathe in this charred perfume, 23 square miles of conifers and oakbrush gone up in flames several miles away. Last report, the fire was about to crest the ridge at 10,000 feet where the front line is being slurried and fought with trenches and hand tools. It’s called the Gold Mountain Fire, started four days ago outside of Ouray, Colorado, from powerlines downed in a windstorm. That wind hasn’t let up. Ash twirls down on us like snow. 

My mom and I carry out furniture she built, heavy oak productions that we load in our two trucks, plus my stepdad’s laptop, a Navajo rug, and a copper bucket containing a box of matches, anything that just can’t be replaced. 

Hold up, I say to the copper bucket and its matches. Why are we taking this?

My mom puzzles the question. She looks exhausted. She says, In case it gets so hot in the house they light.

If it’s that hot, it’s too late. 

I think she’s gotten four hours sleep in the last two nights, and she’s 80, and like feathers of mascara, ashes have landed on her cheeks and shoulders. My stepdad would be here but he had surgery yesterday and is down at their place in town recovering.

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In Search of Low Carbon Joy

By: | July 27, 2026
Co-Authors Dr. Jiaying Zhao and Dr. Elizabeth Dunn

I’ve been following Liz Dunn’s happiness research for a while, and now she has co-written a new book, Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species (Penguin Random House), about how joy could be the missing weapon in our fight against climate change. Here we sit down for a Q&A about her work.

Jessa: So you and Jiaying Zhao, colleagues at University of British Columbia, have co-written a book. What are your respective research foci and how do they fit together in this collaboration?

Liz: I’m a happiness researcher, and my work focuses on how to optimize our use of resources to maximize happiness. So time, money, technology—I studied AI and smartphones and things like that, and then I got interested in carbon as another one of these. In this case, we don’t want to create too much of it. JZ is one of the world’s leading experts on the behavioural side of climate change. So, how do we change human behaviour in a way that tackles climate change.

Our two specialties are usually on opposite sides of the room—we do not find ourselves next to each other at a cocktail party. But in this case, bringing our almost non-overlapping areas of expertise together has been really powerful. It creates dual lenses so we can find the sweet spot between having a genuine impact on climate change and what makes people happier.

Jessa: One of the concepts in the book that really rang true for me was hedonic adaptation. What people think will make them happy only does up to a point. How does that manifest in our daily lives?

Liz: Yeah, so hedonic adaptation is like the gravity of happiness research—it keeps us from floating away with joy. Whatever happens to us in life, we tend to adapt to it. That’s good because we are pretty good at recovering from bad things, but we also recover from good ones. Somebody from the Renaissance would be blown away by the comforts and conveniences of our daily lives, but we don’t walk around marveling at them. We get used to them.

This is important for thinking about climate change, because it can be tempting to overconsume, ratcheting up our desires and feeling like we need more. The mistake we make is thinking the 10th pair of designer shoes will give us the same level of pleasure the first one did.

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On Boundary Conditions

By: | July 24, 2026

Three years ago I wrote a post about boundary conditions, those irrevocabilities that set limits on our lives. (You don’t like having limits? you want to negotiate limits? too bad. Boundary conditions like uncertainty and change, for instance, you want security? too bad; you want to make plans? too bad. Or old age, too bad; and of course death comes to mind.) Anyway, I illustrated that post with an errant phlox that just showed up in the amsonia, that seemed to be a sign of something good. That phlox: even with all the non-negotiable boundary conditions, boink! here I am anyway!

Anyway, today, after a few days of staying inside because the smoke-soaked air came with excited public health warnings, I went outside. The air was better, not green yet but yellow and at least not orange let alone purple. So I walked around the garden, looked at the amsonia, and boink, there was the phlox again, only not just one phlox but two. The phlox had doubled. What could this mean? Was it good? It seemed good.

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Consent & the Afterlife

By: | July 20, 2026
The cartonnage of Gautseshenu, ca. 945–712 B.C.E. Image by the Brooklyn Museum.

In the Egyptian wing of the Brooklyn Museum my young son stands before a beautiful coffin containing the body of woman named Gautseshenu. Her name means “bouquet of lotuses,” though neither of us can pronounce it. After a couple bumbling tries we stop, me out of embarrassment and him because her name is not the point, and the whole idea here is still so very, very strange. 

How old? he asks again. 

Almost 3,000 years, I say.

And how old am I? 

He knows. He’s just checking against a void of time he can feel but make no sense of. The numbers, after all, mean nothing. Nor do the dynasties, the stories of the gods, the practical matters of corpse conservation. Some much more fundamental attraction is unfolding, and it’s linked to this: just beyond a few layers of linen, gesso, and paint, is a body. And just beyond that is the world of the dead. I’ve now watched this odd magic work its irresistible charm on both this son and his older brother—as well as hundreds of other kids who’ve stood beside us at various museums, staring at the mummies and tapping on the glass, weekend after weekend, year after year. 

A couple of decades ago Gautseshenu and other mummies here in Brooklyn were pulled from their galleries and returned to storage, away from the view of visitors. According to the museum’s web site, it had something to do with respect, or at least a reconsideration of what we think we’re trying to accomplish when we put the old dead on display. The mummies have been back for many years, though, and there have even been some relatively new discoveries made from them: at least two of the Brooklyn mummies were long mis-gendered as women, and are today—after CT scans—understood to be men. 

There is also now a quiet acknowledgment in the gallery of the fact that so puzzles and fascinates my sons: rich and exotic as they appear, colorful as carnival prizes, inside each of these packages are the remains of an actual person. Someone who assumed (or at least hoped) that after death they would spend eternity undisturbed. A sign at the entrance to the mummy chamber asks you to remember this, but my son, only 5, cannot yet read.

And yet it comes up. I’ve actually found questions about dignity and propriety to be among the first kids ask about the dead-on-display—once they get past the goosebumps. Years ago at the Met my eldest son paused, stood up from his examination of a mummy, and said, Why are they here? Did they know they would be? Now, before Gautseshenu, my middle son wants to know, Where is her family? Each question, in its way, is about belonging, but also consent—something we may never ask of the old dead. 

For a while on this late Saturday morning my son and I have the gallery nearly to ourselves. He wants to race to the mummies, to blast thought centuries and get to them. I try to slow him down, pull him toward statues and jewelry, scarabs and sphinxes. But there’s no tempering the allure of death, and soon we’re in the mummy chamber.

Here, he learns to identify Anubis, Osiris, Horus, heavy-hitters of the Egyptian pantheon, and moves from object to object, sarcophagus to cartonnage, finding them easily. Against the glass of the cases he traces hieroglyphs. And he squints skeptically at the eye painted on some of the coffins, through which the dead were believed to see: a kind of window onto the world they were leaving behind. 

Can they really see us? he asks.

Silently I think, I hope not. Out loud I just say, Maybe. 

He takes a step or two back, measuring the distance again between himself and the dead. Then, before he bounds away, he holds up a finger and wags it the mummy, as if to say, Oh no you don’t.

Lost in Curiosity

By: | July 17, 2026

Our Roberta wrote a book!

Roberta Kwok wrote for The Last Word on Nothing for several years — and once a Person of LWON, always a Person of LWON. Her first book, Lost in Curiosity, comes out on July 21. It’s filled with stories of the ups and downs of astronomers, physicists, frog biologists, and more (read on to find out which chapter got its start as an LWON post).

Indie booksellers have already been celebrating Roberta’s writing, and we want to celebrate, too! Here’s an interview with Roberta about her fabulous new book.

*

Cameron: How did the idea for the book come about?

Roberta: It’s hard to believe, but the seed for this book was planted 20 years ago. I was an MFA student in creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington, and I decided to write an essay about a scientist friend, Ben Blackman, who studied sunflowers. As part of the reporting, I followed him on a 20-hour lab experiment collecting leaf samples every few hours. And what struck me was how many things went wrong; most critically, at the 11pm and 3am timepoints, Ben discovered that some lights weren’t configured correctly, and all the samples we’d just laboriously collected might be useless. But he seemed to see this state of affairs as pretty normal and was ready to re-do the entire experiment. (Meanwhile, I was exhausted because I never stayed up this late.)

About 12 years later, I thought that maybe I could write a book exploring that theme — the hidden human struggles, failures, and uncertainty behind scientific discoveries, or the opposite of a Eureka moment. I loved narrative science books like Lab Girl and Owls of the Eastern Ice, where researchers told stories of the obstacles they’d faced and overcome. I wanted to take that idea a step further by following a research project from a different field in each chapter, creating a sort of tapestry of science. The vision was that the book could show science as a massive collective enterprise driven by the tiny steps — forward, and often backward — that individual scientists take.

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TIL, for Today I Learned, Is the Best Acronym. What Have You Learned Lately?

By: | July 15, 2026
The letter Q evolved from a hieroglyph of a monkey. The Q’s tail is a monkey’s tail.

The best acronym, in this our golden age of acronyms, is TIL, for Today I Learned. I love it. People use #TIL as a hashtag on social media, but not to show off. It doesn’t mean “I know something you don’t know, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah.” It means here’s something I just learned, and it’s delightful, and I’d like to share it with you. It’s humble. It’s generous. TIL is the opposite of smug. 

TIL names that distinct burst of joy you get when you learn something you’re happy to know. It’s a way to mark that moment, to recognize that life is enriched by this new word or stray fact. It’s why trivia night at a brewpub is so much fun. It’s great when you know the answer to a trivia question, especially when it’s something you didn’t know you knew. (In what fictional county was the TV show “Hee Haw” set? Cornfield County (although they spell it with Ks, which is unfortunate).) The irritation of missing a question is balanced by the opportunity to learn from it. Did you know baseball players use a modified bat to pop up fly balls so their teammates can practice fielding? And it has a name? It’s called a “fungo.” (Thanks, Pourhouse Trivia.) 

There’s an XKCD comic about TIL (because there is always an XKCD comic). If “everyone knows” something, Randall Munroe calculates, at least 10,000 people are learning it new every day. You can learn a lot from comics! This week I learned from Rosemary Mosco’s Bird and Moon that most rabbits nest under leaves, not in a burrow. 

I’m using the T in TIL loosely in this post, to cover things I’ve learned in the past weeks or months, but today (literally today) I learned that TIL is more precisely an an initialism, and not a classic acronym, which is a spoken word formed from initials, like NASA or FUBAR. I bet a lot of you knew that already. That’s one reason TIL contains multitudes: It reveal weakness and trusts you not to gloat.

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Crouching Spider, Hidden Tiger

By: | July 13, 2026
Willa (Menemerus semilimbatus). Betsy Mason

Jumping spiders can see as well as house cats — despite being less than 10mm long in most cases. I find this astounding, but people almost never seem as impressed as I think they should be when I tell them this. Perhaps they don’t believe it could be true. 

It is, though. Scientists have measured these spiders’ spatial acuity, and it is on par with cats, pigeons, and elephants. Let that sink in for a moment. Jumping spiders can comfortably fit on your fingernail, while elephants are around 80 times bigger than you are. 

As I reported a few years back for Science News, your own visual acuity is only around five or ten times better than a jumping spider’s. “Given that you can fit a lot of spiders in one single human eyeball, that is pretty remarkable,” animal behavior researcher Ximena Nelson, who studies jumping spiders at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, told me. “In terms of size-for-size, there’s just no comparison whatsoever to the type of spatial acuity that jumping spider eyes can achieve.” 

That incredible eyesight evolved for a purpose: hunting. Jumping spiders do not build webs and sit around all night waiting for prey to become ensnared. They are out in the daytime hunting flies and other insects. And this brings us to another way these tiny arachnids are like cats.

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