One of the great signs of spring in Washington, D.C., is the herds of middle schoolers who arrive, on trips to Learn About America. I got to partake in this annual migration in a small way myself this year; a friend from college had brought her very own eighth grader to town for spring break. […]
Nature
We, the People of LWON, write whatever the f*** we want. But on days when we just can’t, we rerun an old post. Today, I just can’t. And yet rerunning old posts is against my personal religion. So today I am excavating the blog post that I partially wrote in the summer of 2021 and […]
One Sunday in November, my boyfriend and I were arriving back at his house at noon or so, after a visit to the market for a baguette and bacon. As I waited for him to unlock his door, I looked at the pretty maple tree next to me. It had Christmas lights wrapped around its […]
In the early days of the pandemic, I found myself faced with a test of courage even more daunting than disinfecting groceries: peeing in the woods as a woman, and a very pregnant one, at that. As part of the research for my book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, I had contacted wildlife […]
Note: This is a personal essay that happens to include a lot of neat facts about bats. It should not be confused with Our Helen’s excellent 2017 post of the same name. I suggest reading both; there’s no such thing as too much information about bats. The facts and statistics in this piece are accurate […]
The skirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a frictional zone scrubbed with busted tortoise shells and Joshua trees that lean toward the sun. High tension power lines intersect at substations and disperse from there into the desert. A buddy and I camped in this liminal space a couple months ago and all night long the […]
My blue jay friends are back, tap-dancing on my balcony to get my attention, peering accusingly through the living room windows until I get up to fetch the peanut dish. There are many, many more blue jay poems in my future. Here’s one from the past. (This post first appeared in March of 2022). Many […]