The Last Word On Nothing

Welcome to one of Helen and Cameron’s periodic conversations on wool!

The other day I couldn’t come up with the name Jane Goodall.

My wife and I were hiking up a pain in the ass desert canyon the other day, hand over hand between bus-sized boulders, no trail to follow, when she said she was done and sat in the shade.

Recently, while working through Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy with my mom, I encountered a new-to-me poetic form: the sestina.

The other week I was trudging through laps around the court I live on, and a neighbor yelled across the court, first “HI” and I yelled “HI” right back and then he yelled, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR!”

On this day in 2025, my best good girl left this world.

I recently came across this bucket at one of our local coffee shops — a common drop and collection point for free goods, from books and magazines to excess zucchinis and figs.

My mother has forgotten she wants to die.

Habronattus pyrrithrix (Betsy Mason) Tomorrow is international jumping spider day, so I’m taking this as an excuse to tell you about one my favorite jumping spiders, Habronattus pyrrhithrix.

Yesterday Francis Halzen received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for overseeing the experiment that detected an extraordinarily elusive subatomic particle via an ingenious reinterpretation of the concept of “telescope.”

Grief is a persistent little bugger.

My friend Laura provided me an instructive moment of delight yesterday when she confided that she’d just opened a jar of 2007 “Plum Yum,” a jammy concoction made of Italian prune plums from my orchard.

Over the last week I was lucky enough to spend several days communing with science writers in Oregon.

Your average frog loves a good meaty fly.

Since writing a book on the night sky (The Wild Dark), I can’t help looking up.

It is fall, and even though not much changes here, the light becomes low and golden.

I’m not getting any less mad about this, didn’t you hear me the first time?

Sometimes we change our minds about big life choices: where we live, what career we pursue, who walks beside us.

So there we were, on the deck of a nice restaurant with a view of the mountains and a valley with a river flowing through it, and a menu Google had described as “elevated.”

On the second Tuesday of October, a small subset of humanity celebrates Ada Lovelace Day in honour of the 19th Century computing pioneer.

A tunnel along the Great Allegheny Passage rail trail.

A map of the world published in 1961 by the U.S.

Dueting with animals will always be thrilling for me, and I’ll always envision our melodic conversations filling a sound gap somewhere up there.

If you really squint at a map and spin up your full kindergarten imagination, Great Britain looks like a little cartoon dinosaur roaring at Europe, its tail pointing back across the Atlantic ocean.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: There is a bug that is the best bug, and it is the cicada.

And here we are enduring another wet blast of late summer’s hot breath, a last gasp before fall blows in.

This post came out a few years ago exploring anxiety and big, wild cats.

Betsy Mason Innovation is one of those abilities we used to think only humans possessed.

Baltimore in August: I was out on my early-morning walk, I don’t even know the temperature or humidity or feels-like combination, I’ve given up caring but all numbers were high, and I ran into a neighbor going the same way so we walked together for a bit.

This post originally appeared on my Substack Terra Affirma as a paid post.

A view of the Alaska Railroad after the Great Quake of 1964.

Debunking Hollywood is LWON’s very occasional series that takes a hard science look at common TV and movie tropes.