After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, […]
Technology
It started with the maggots. One hot Australian January morning, unlucky beachcombers had discovered millions of the fleshy nubs orgiastically crawling over each other and everything else on Newport Beach. No one knew where they had come from, and the beach-storming maggots left without an explanation. But when they returned, it was for good. They […]
Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life was just published 10 days ago, but since we here at LWON are not confined by space or time, we can already tell you how her 30-day plan worked for us. Last spring, the two of us were […]
The psychology department is a small, squatty building on the west side of campus. It has a weird exterior, a vaguely geometric set of slats that surround the building, probably to cover up the ailing stucco beneath. You’re five minutes late. With a backpack slung over your back, you hustle down the hall, looking for […]
Inspired by true events Me: Alexa. Good morning. Alexa: Good morning! On this day in 1961, NASA sent a chimpanzee named Ham into space, flying 155 miles up in the Mercury capsule. But these scientists weren’t just aping around. This mission was designed to tell them about – Me: Alexa stop. Alexa, did […]
Today marks the publication of yet another study telling us that our screens are making us miserable. Psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University looked at survey results from more than a million U.S. 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders and found that those who spent more than an hour a day gazing into the rectangular […]
When the ancient Greeks wanted to get something done, they really committed. In 499 B.C., in a bid to get out of an unpleasant job assignment, Histaeus, the leader of Miletus, plotted a rebellion against the Persian king Darius the Great. Elaborately coded missives sent to co-conspirators would only rouse suspicion. He needed something much […]
A good proportion of science fiction can be summed up like this: scientists invent a black box that does a magical thing. Hooray! Oh no… wait… that magical thing has some kinks. Oh dear, oh my, look what has happened, it turns out that there are some downsides to the magical box. The thing is, […]