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The Last Word
October 8 – 12 This week, Christie remembered Karen, and reminded us that the “beating cancer” narrative is pernicious and false. From his review, I can’t tell if Richard liked Einstein on the Beach,...
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Dance of Conquest
This is the kind of story that I love, a story about an ordinary person doing something perfectly ordinary, digging out the last of the potatoes from the garden, say, or chasing off after a dog that’s...
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The Last Word
Oct. 22 – 26 This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny. Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to...
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The Trainman and the Nobel Laureate
According to his discharge papers, he stood five feet, eight inches tall. He had a pale complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, two moles on his back, his sole distinguishing marks. In June 1918, he was...
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The Last Word
12 – 16 November This week, our site went boom. But we’re all better now. Cassie explored the compelling pseudscience behind chronic Lyme’s disease, and why it can sway even people who should know...
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The Shiny-Jewel Tree of Palenque
This story begins in darkness—darkness both literal and metaphorical. On a dripping wet day in 1952, an archaeologist stood in a small dank corridor deep inside a pyramid known as Temple of the...
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The Last Word
26 – 30 November This week, Heather reveals the man behind the jade mask. 932,891,133 galaxies, over a 14,555-square degree patch of the sky, going 3 billion years back into a universe that’s 13.6...
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DIY Space Flight
Virgin Galactic describes astronauts as “the world’s most exclusive club.” I know this because I recently downloaded the company’s brochure, and spent many happy minutes fantasizing about what it would...
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The Last Word
3 – 7 December 2012 This week, Richard Branson’s spaceflight-for-megabucks scheme might be the trending, but Heather is far more interested in the intriguing history of the Zambian space academy. It’s...
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Secret Satans: Chem 101
For the holiday season, we here at LWON are confronting our fears of certain sciences. We are choosing our most daunting subjects and writing about why they scare us. Heather: Today Christie and I...
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What’s in a Tattoo?
A few years ago, when I was working in a somewhat gritty part of downtown Vancouver, I spotted a tough looking man with an unusual set of facial tattoos. On the...
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The Last Word
31 December – 4 January Well, I guess we made it through 2012 without dying. So, drink up and get back to work. Heather wrote about the strange therapeutic, cultural, and linguistic history of the...
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A Very Dark Corner of Indian Life
Young Indian feminists have begun calling her “Damini.” We don’t know her real name, but most of us have read about the terrible way she died. Damini was the 23-year-old woman attacked and gang-raped...
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The Sad Fate of Libertas Schultze-Boysen
In the first week of September 1942, 29-year-old Libertas Schultze-Boysen waited desperately for word of her husband Harro, an official in the Reich Aviation Ministry in Berlin. The couple had...
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Redux: Survivor Woman
Heather posted this on July 16, 2010, a time when we had probably 13 readers so apologies to all 13. She’s referring to a post Ann wrote about being dead wrong about some science. She also testifies to...
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The Last Word
March 4 – 8 This week, Tom delved deep into the mystery of the SCOBY lumps found at the bottom of an old jug of apple juice. Think nature documentaries merely observe? Don’t read Erik’s post. Heather...
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Brewing Up a Very Good Time
It started two Christmases ago. That’s when I learned that beer is the new wine. My nephew, a film student, came home from McGill expounding on the finer points of Belgian Gueuze and German...
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The Last Word
March 18 – 22 FOLWON* guest poster Brooke Borel introduces the world to the bed bug hockey stick graph. Read it and you will understand why data journalism is about to change the world. That’s highly...
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Redux: What to Wear on an Ice-Age Sea Voyage?
If you were one of the 14 (a made-up number) people who read this back when LWON was publishing wonderful posts but was otherwise just a baby staggering around on inept little feet, we apologize for...
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Soap Operas versus the Population Bomb?
It’s early morning in a Mumbai train station. The video is grainy, but you can clearly make out a dense swarm of humanity along the platform. By my count, the crowd stands at least ten or twelve...
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