I Got the Post Puppy Blues

By: | September 29, 2015
My majestic animal

Anybody who knows me at all, in any context, probably knows that I adopted a dog two weeks ago. It’s all I talk about all the time. Sources know that she might try to get in my lap during an interview. Friends know that they’re invited over any time to see her and teach her how to play nice. My family knows because I already brag about how much better behaved she is than their dogs.

What they probably don’t know is that for a few days in a row last week I came home from running errands and sat on my floor and cried. Continue reading →

New Person of LWON: Rose Eveleth

By: | September 28, 2015

9544541664_b43ec6c183_zWe are pleased as punch to welcome the supremely talented Rose Eveleth to the LWON fold. Rose is the host and producer of Meanwhile in the Future, a podcast from Gizmodo about … you guessed it … the future. She’s also a great writer. Need proof: Just read this awesome story she wrote about the tiny town of Eveleth, Minnesota. Or this one about how farmers abuse their prosthetic limbs.

Here are some other fun facts about Rose: She likes to build strange little things. Her favorite animal is the fox. She has a New Jersey accent that she hides unless she’s very mad. And somewhere on her body is a tattoo of a Dymaxion map.

We’ve been hounding Rose to join for what seems like decades. We’re so glad she finally caved. Tune in tomorrow for her first post.

*Photo courtesy of JD Hancock via Flickr

 

Face Time

By: | September 28, 2015

shutterstock_242650873I was at an airport not long ago when a TSA agent did a double take while checking my ID. I’m used to this. I’ve always been blessed with youthful looks, and typically people meeting me don’t believe I’m actually nearing a half-century of years on Earth. Occasionally I’m still carded in bars. That feels nice. So I smiled, ready for the usual compliment.

But this was different. This man looked at my photo, looked again at me, squinting, and said, “Wow, you look about 16 in your picture!” Translation: “You look waaaaay older than you did when that photo was taken.” It was the first time someone had remarked, even indirectly, that my face finally matched my years.

It was inevitable. After all, one can’t look like a teenager forever. Life carves away at us in visible ways, even those of us with good DNA. And I’ve had a lot of poor health in the last decade, with effects that I’ve been seeing in the mirror more and more. Tired eyes. Splotchy skin with spots that no long pass as cute freckles. That extra pat of fat under the chin. Deep lines like scars between the brows. Thinning hair. It’s all here, on a girl who thought maybe, just maybe, she’d sipped from the fountain of youth.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 26, 2015

scary

September 21 – 25, 2015

According to John Locke, a man’s labor is his own, and so when it is embedded in the land he works, that land becomes his own. Guest Julie Rehmeyer contends the connection goes both ways – we belong to the land we tend.

Abstruce Goose demonstrates the correct response to sarcasm in any argument.

There is wonder in the thought that we share a landscape with those who lived thousands of years ago, and that their material culture surrounds us still. Craig traces the journey of a Clovis tool collection.

Ann’s local coffee shop is a haven for scientific speculation and a positive hypothesis factory. It highlights one of the scientific method’s most socially-oriented steps.

My son takes his first small plane ride and lobbies for aerobatics. I explore the developmental nature of fear.

Image: Shutterstock

Coffeeshop Science

By: | September 24, 2015

6957372578_74f2231cf2_zSomewhere in the deep pits of my mind, I still think of “scientists” as remote people whose sentences I won’t understand, and of “science” as an incomprehensible body of knowledge I have to memorize.  This is probably also the public’s image of science.  But if 1000 years as a science writer have taught me nothing else, it’s 1) that science is the way people think when they’re admiring their worlds, when they’re thinking of explanations of their worlds that they can most reliably believe.  And 2) that scientists are just specially-educated versions of the guys in the coffee shops. Continue reading →

Your Daily Time Machine

By: | September 23, 2015

shutterstock_231606049For me, geography is a time machine. The shape of the land sets the dials. Artifacts are keys.

A few days ago I was watching for mammoth hunters out a train window. Climbing through the Rocky Mountains on the California Zephyr, I looked for spear bearers in the bony canyons and pine woods along the eastbound line. I thought I might catch a glimpse of them as they found gaps between glaciers, a way across the mountains where glaciers are now all but gone. They were on their way to Boulder, CO, or at least the Ice Age location of the city when it was a slope of retreating permafrost in a country of mammoths, camels, and giant bears.

In 2009 a landscaping job at a private residence in Boulder turned up a cache of Clovis stone tools dating to around 13,000 years ago. The types of rock found in the cache reveal a route followed in part by the Zephyr up and over the Rockies. Traced back to quarry regions where they were first picked up, the farthest rocks in the cache come from western Wyoming and northeast Utah, 300 miles and many mountains from where they were ultimately dropped. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Argument from Obliviousness

By: | September 22, 2015

i_know_someone_like_this_but_im_pretty_sure_she_just_does_it_to_torture_meI’d use this tactic on my nearest and dearest but it takes a certain emotional composure and psychological distance, and right when I should be doing killer obliviousness, I get irate and jump in with both feet and lose the argument entirely.  I personally see this as a virtue.

 

http://abstrusegoose.com/558

Guest Post: The Lords of Yesterday

By: | September 21, 2015

As my husband and I drove into Ouray, Colorado recently, we both gasped. The red-grey cliffs of 14,000-foot mountains cradle the old mining town, with waterfall lacework tracing down the mountainsides — one of the most gorgeous spots on Earth. But it was the stream tumbling through the valley we were gasping at: It was yellow, only a few shades less intense than the Tang color of the Animas River when mine tailings had poured into it earlier this summer. Has there been a spill here that I haven’t heard about? I thought, horrified. Continue reading →