4/20: I write an email to a scientist. I explain that I work in an old building that sits in a sort of pit, partly surrounded by a hill. Midway along the hill is a little terrace on which is a street, and along the street, a sidewalk and a wire fence; and they’re all […]
LWON
I’ve had occasion in these pages before to write about searches for alien planets and alien life and for both, to register the loftiest disdain. I mean, crissakes, the universe is jam-packed with philosophy-shattering freakshows, and we’re looking for things we already know exist? Planets and life are not news. I learned this outlook from […]
Last week Jessa wrote about psychiatric diagnoses moving from the quantum to the continuum, from neat little packages to subtleties that include shades of gray and something called “a quantifiable baseline of life functioning.” The same week, Ginny published a story about the same diagnostic changes but applied specifically to pathological grief – the problem […]
Heather asked about the SETI telescope at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, whether having its budget zeroed out mattered in any way. Had it ever found anything? Could it be re-purposed? No it hasn’t and yes it can, but I don’t care because, ma’am, I am seriously running out of patience with the whole enterprise. […]
One year ago today, the People of LWON published their first post. It was by Josie Glausiusz, it was on flesh-eating algae, and we thank her for setting that tone. Writing LWON — that is, writing what we want to and in the way we want to write it — turns out to be a […]
My grandfather was interested in the Faust legend and I inherited the interest, though for the life of me I don’t know why it’s interesting and he died before I could ask him. Whatever it is, it has to do with trading your soul for certain bad kinds of knowledge, or with excessive curiosity leading […]
I’ve kept an eye on neutrinos ever since I heard, back in the mid-1980’s, that not enough of them were coming out of the sun; this sounded serious. It turned out that the sun was behaving itself but the neutrinos weren’t. On its way out of the sun, any given neutrino was changing into three […]
“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a good night to murder the king. Even a century earlier, the collective noun was “a murder of crows.” Three centuries later, a poet watches a horse that’s been shot: “gorged crows rise ragged in the wind. […]