When I was five or six years old, my mom’s boyfriend took us ice fishing. He drove his Jeep to the edge of one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes and then he kept going, down the boat ramp and out onto the glittering expanse of white. He stopped next to a small ice shanty, and […]
Five years ago I wrote a post about Pat Elliott, a woman with chronic leukemia. She was trying to figure out how to pay for her medication. At the time, Gleevec cost about $5,000 a month. A generic version of Gleevec went on the market in 2016, but it still costs more than $4,000 a […]
Donut the dog has always been a bit of a lemon. “She hates kids. She hates other dogs. She hates physical activity,” says Julia Gilden. Gilden adopted the 80-pound Bearded Collie seven years ago. All the things people love about dogs? Donut didn’t really have many of those attributes. But she was sweet and goofy […]
A couple of months ago, I wrote about a woman in Puerto Rico who posted a picture of her chicken soup in a Facebook group for lovers of a kitchen gadget called the Instant Pot. We’ve heard a lot of news about the devastation and sluggish pace of recovery in Puerto Rico, but I wanted […]
I am delighted to introduce, Rebecca Boyle, a supremely talented independent journalist and the newest person of LWON. Becky got her start as a newspaper reporter covering state and local politics. But then she returned to her first love: space. Her abiding love for astronomy drives her outside on frosty winter nights even though she […]
I ran into my own Harvey Weinstein at the supermarket last week. He stopped me in the vegetable aisle with a “hey, I know you . . .” His brow furrowed as he tried to work out the connection. “Weren’t you so-and-so’s roommate?” he asked. I was. His face didn’t look familiar, but then he […]
Newbie journalists love to ask where seasoned journalists find their story ideas. I’ll tell you where I find mine: Editors. They have really good ideas and sometimes they’ll just hand them to you. That’s called an assignment, and I take a lot of them. Unfortunately, LWON doesn’t give assignments. So when you sign up for […]
This post first ran on March 13, 2015. On September 27, 1937, Susie Mae DeLoach caught her leg on a strip of barbed wire. The wound festered, and the infection spread, eventually reaching her heart. None of the remedies DeLoach’s doctor recommended seemed to have any effect. And by the time her family called Dr. Johnston […]