To walk from the Charles Darwin Research Station to the center of the town of Puerto Ayora, on Santa Cruz Island, simply follow the “T-Shirt Mile,” a sleepy stone road lined with dozens of souvenir shops. Mugs, onesies and shot glasses pay tribute the town’s only famous resident, a century-old giant tortoise named Lonesome George. […]
Virginia
July 2 – 6 This week, Tom wondered why one of the greatest mental capacities our outrageously successful species possesses hardly works at all. Faced with parenting in a region “where a high school diploma confers a solid elementary school education”, Jessa weighed her home schooling options and whether they could guarantee a prodigy. Cassie’s […]
This is the third installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read the first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here, and the second, about eerie mounds of black coral, here. If you go to the Galápagos, and even if you go, as I did, in a herd of clumsy American tourists, […]
This is the second installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read my first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here. At dawn on June 6, more than 30 years after Lynn was chasing tortoises at the top of Alcedo, our boat anchored near the volcano’s base in Urbina Bay. By […]
June 18 – June 22 “Don’t expect to get a penis every Friday, because you won’t.” Thus spake Cassandra, introducing occasional penis Fridays, a new LWON effort, so to speak. The introductory post in the series concerned banana slug sex, which is even grosser than the sum of its parts, and that’s saying a lot. […]
Every Monday for the next six weeks I’ll be posting about my recent trip to the Galápagos. After a week on a big boat, hopping from one imposing volcanic island to the next, I saw most of the odd creatures that Charles Darwin famously wrote about: century-old tortoises, finches with beaks of all sizes, swimming […]
(Update below) I write mostly about neuroscience, genetics and biotechnology. That means I spend most of my time talking to and writing about men. In May of 2011 (chosen arbitrarily just because it was a year ago and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t thinking about this gender gap then), 89 percent of my phone interviews […]
Happy Birthday to us, we’ve just turned two. We’re bigger: we’ve added three new Persons of LWON. And we’ve matured, that is, we stopped looking so much at our own bellybutton and are more aware of the intelligent, thoughtful Commenters of LWON. So for our birthday celebration, we’ll look back at the year and not […]