~the-last-word-on-no | Bookmarks (54)

Ben no longer writes for us but he left us this post to remember him by. This time last year Elise and I were bellied up to a bar (remember those?) in Montana, talking about what childless dog-owning couples generally talk about: our pet. We’d owned Kit — or had she owned us? — for […]

This winter and late spring, when we all had mono and a variety of flus and colds and for a while thought Pete might have cancer, we spent a lot of time on the couch watching Pete’s favorite comfort shows. I was scared and trying not to be dramatic about it, but I couldn’t stop […]

Don’t read too much into this, but I have become an obsessive bird spy. I blame LaWONian Ben Goldfarb. He wrote a post about his birdcam (and the board game Wingspan, which I still intend to try), and it made me think that a birdcam would be a great Mother’s Day gift. I consulted with […]

What’s the best thing on my phone? The Merlin Bird ID app. It listens and tells you (with reasonable accuracy) what birds are around you. Recently I heard someone singing who I didn’t immediately recognize, but I thought sounded fluty and musical, like a thrush. Merlin agreed: Swainson’s thrush, a new bird for me. In […]

I was sipping my second cup of coffee the other morning when I got this call: “Hi Jenny, this is Dr. Menon’s office. You need to go to the ER immediately. You have a pulmonary embolism.” Pulmonary embolism? Isn’t that the thing where the old guy down the street gets shepherded away in an ambulance […]

This coming Monday is the new moon, which means by tonight we are in the soup. There’s nothing to block the stars but clouds…and us. Every month has its dark nadir and we’re pretty much there, stars as bright and numerous as they’ll ever be. That’s the thing about a full night sky, it’s as […]

When I need to get out of my head, I go to Ellwood. This stretch of bluffs along the coast in western Goleta has trails through open grasslands and small paths that wind down to a wide beach, where you can find driftwood forts and views out to the Channel Islands. At its north end, […]

Richard L. Garwin died this week on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. He was born April 19, 1928, you can do the math. He lived a long time but I still don’t see how he did everything he did. I interviewed him a lot over the years, and stayed in touch even after his health stopped […]

I need your help. I’m trying to find a phrase to describe an important phenomenon and maybe help people recognize it more easily. The phenomenon is this: When we fix a problem, we forget it. I don’t mean you and me in “we” — we, of course, remember. But pop culture forgets, and the mass […]

I am honored to introduce a new Person of LWON, Laura Helmuth, who probably doesn’t need introducing at all, given that she has done everything (editing mostly, but also editing-in-chief and giving encouraging talks and getting a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and winning awards and being on every science writing committee and institution known to […]

This is Diego. He is a Phidippus johnsoni jumping spider, and he lives on a jade plant in my front yard. There are several spiders of this species that can be found on the jade plant on any given day, but I know when it’s Diego I’ve spotted. Adult males of this species are around […]

It’s my pleasure to welcome Betsy Mason as the newest person of LWON. Betsy is an award-winning freelance science journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a senior editor at Wired for many years, and she has won a lot of accolades, including the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman award for breaking […]

When I pull into the boat ramp parking lot, it’s just after midnight. It should be deserted. Nobody goes night boating. But my headlights illuminate a red sedan parked hood to the woods. I can’t tell if it’s occupied. The windows are dark. My brain tries to make it make sense. You can’t pull a […]

One morning a few years ago, I woke to find I had lost most of the hearing in my left ear. In place of my usual acoustic environment was a high electronic ringing—eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—as if a giant TV had been left on mute. Me being me, I assumed the issue would work itself out, but when […]

I have never fallen into quicksand, but like most people, I have been anxious about it at least several times in my life. You have too, right? It’s a real thing — you can be sucked down into the soft liquefied Earth unexpectedly, on hikes or on random walks. One of my friends fell into […]

 This first ran January 3, 2019. I don’t know if Emily ever bought disability insurance or not. — Ed. “This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink in El Dorado Hills, California. The “Family Friendly Winter Wonderland” was in a shopping mall surrounded by faux-Tuscan mansions, […]

Oh Spring! It’s a season of contrast. Winter has ended (unless you live in Colorado, as I do, and winter continues to return until you’ve mowed the lawn at least once or twice). It’s a time of renewal, when dormant things come back to life. It’s also a time of change and anticipation and unsettledness.  […]

In the last two years I’ve had a number of stressful experiences. And every time I’ve realized: I am really suffering, but this is a very normal experience. People do these things all the time. How did I not realize how amazingly tough all these people are? For example: my parents both died, about 7 […]

Can I just say this? Those of us born in the 1960s and ‘70s are in a special hell right now. With jobs being taken away and careers being cut short and talents losing out to “influencers” and AI and Bots that Chat, it’s been a uniquely painful time. Those in my generation who chose […]

Going into nature, how long does it take till you feel like you’re there? There meaning not sending emails in your head and not wincing at shifts of temperature or humidity when sun turns to rain? There’s a comfort that comes over you. Hands and the heart are no longer so far apart and pulling […]

My phone buzzed just as I was finishing filming with the BBC Sky at Night crew for an episode about Mars, having spent the day immersed in the high-resolution panoramas returned by the Curiosity and Perserverance rovers. A text from a researcher wondered if I’d be around to comment on embargoed research from scientists in […]

Ben has had to leave LWON but has kindly left us these memories, these posts which we rerun because we like him so much. Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: […]

In a few weeks, the back fence by the elementary school with be a place where migrants gather themselves before they leave. The fence is popular because of its temperature and the protection it offers. The sun hits the fence from mid-morning until late afternoon in May, and so many years of sun has turned […]