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Dip, Dip and Swing
Another Canada Day has passed, eclipsed in my part of the country by the festivities of Aboriginal Day, which falls just a week beforehand. Bizarrely, it was the Google Doodle this year that most...
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Redux: Whither the Dorset?
Five years ago, I received a fateful invitation to join the Last Word On Nothing. Since then, almost all of the faces have changed, but its maverick spirit lives on. Much like the culture of the...
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Rosetta and Philae: Plucky siblings for life
On September 30, the Rosetta orbiter will make a controlled collision with Comet 67P/C-G. It is not designed for landing, so this is the last we will hear from it. This date also marks an end to a...
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Redux: Killing in the Name of Science
On the occasion of fifteen years of science writing, I revisit the task that led me out of science. When I first wrote this piece, I have to admit, I was shaking and crying. It was a passage I needed...
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Thankful? Oh, Really?
Ann: It’s been a fairly dreadful year, personally and nationally, and giving thanks is going to be a stretch. But even when I was a kid, I was thankless. When my grandfather said grace at Sunday...
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The Last Word
December 5-9. 2016 At a writing residency in Oregon, Emma finds a bird foot in coyote scat, and then sees death all around her in the forest. When I stopped for lunch, I took out my notebook and...
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The Freshwater Bullies of Gatun Lake
The crocodiles should not be a problem. Yes, the population has spiked after being placed under protection, and there have been some attacks recently. But those attacks tend to happen when somebody...
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Diary of a Human Zoo Animal
Last week I roamed the trails of the Zurich Zoo with my son. The new elephant exhibit, we heard, included an underwater window in which one could watch the elephantine legs paddling. As a tourist...
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First, AI came for our volunteer jobs
In 2007, while a researcher at Oxford, astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski co-founded what would become the largest online citizen science project to date. Galaxy Zoo involved several hundred thousand...
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The Last Word
April 16-20 For much of the country, spring warmth is too long in coming this year. Much too long. But we are well past the equinox and the days are getting longer, and that means the running and...
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Counting Sheep
As a method of falling asleep, counting sheep never made any sense to me. The cartoons of my childhood were full of animated sheep leaping one by one above reclining characters, sometimes inside of...
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Redux: The Last Battle
This post first appeared more than four years ago, and I wish I could tell you the state of Alzheimer’s treatment had progressed significantly since then. Mostly the change has been for the worse–baby...
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Redux: Dolphins–Largely Unexceptional
There is a hyper-intelligent mammal in the oceans with whom we might communicate if only we were a more empathetic and patient species. This is the unspoken assumption behind most coverage I see of...
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Eloise at the Château
For two years, I have felt like Eloise in the beloved 1950s children’s classic of the same name. A sudden need for shared office space led me to a reasonably priced desk in downtown Ottawa, but the...
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LWON is 10 Today!
It’s our 10th anniversary! Today! We’re celebrating all week with postcards we wrote to our 10-years-younger selves. Today Jane, Heather, Jessa, and Ginny hint at good things to come. Jane C. Hu Dear...
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Redux: La Vie Souterraine
“The year is 1994. We are all living underground.” So begins a 1960s movie my friends and I howled about in the year 1996, watching a large cast of extras in metallic bell-bottoms surging purposefully...
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Sci Fi lives on in the people it created
What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my...
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Sam Sells Seashells By the Seashore
This originally appeared in 2015. There’s a popular myth about Dutch last names that goes like this: When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands and instituted a family name registry, only the upper classes...
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Catch me if you can’t
Recently I had cause to doubt someone’s credentials in a situation where credibility was key. Not to worry, I thought, That’s what university registrars are for. You simply call them up and verify...
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N is for Norman, eaten by a lionness
This post originally appeared in March 2012. “It is with the deepest sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of your son Norman. He died after an encounter with a lion near the Keito River in...
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