The wonderful shop-talk site for science writers, The Open Notebook, just published the first of two interviews I did recently with author David Quammen about how he researched and wrote his magnificent new book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. This first installment covers how Quammen gathers the raw materials for his work; next week’s […]
Continue reading →Note: This post first appeared at Slate this past December 28, where it came at the end of a fine series on Pandemics; it seeks to direct you to the best reading and tweeting about the bugs out to kill us. Other Pandemic series highlights included Carl Zimmer’s Koala pandemic genetics: Viruses have inserted themselves into the human genome […]
Continue reading →Someone just directed me to Maggie Koerth-Baker’s examination of a riveting example of the differences between a life lived and a life recalled — in this case, the life memorialized, fictively, in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s splendid Little House on the Prairie. Koerth-Baker, a Little House fan (like much of my household), writes of coming across a transcript […]
Continue reading →Calendar note of jubilation: AT 5:15 pm on Saturday, October 27, in Raleigh, North Carolina, I’ll be doing a live interview and Q&A on craft with David Quammen, whose book Spillover will be published October 1. The 60-minute talk, sponsored by The Open Notebook, is sited and scheduled to fall during a 90-minute break in the […]
Continue reading →Earlier this week, I wrote a post criticizing Naomi Wolf’s use of science in her book “Vagina: A New Biography.” (See Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help, or How Dupe-amine Drove Me Into a Dark Dungeon.) My complaint was that Wolf treated an incredibly complex and ambiguous body of science — the neurobiology of […]
Continue reading →Someone should have warned Naomi Wolf what slippery material she’d get encounter by taking a neuro angle into Vagina: A New Biography. As Zoe Heller explains in her smart, raucous, ripping review in The New York Review of Books, [Wolf’s] original plan was to write a book surveying cultural representations of the vagina through the ages. […]
Continue reading →Note 9/9/12 3:37 pm: After I posted this, a couple people on Twitter pointed out that the Thatcher quote may be wrongly attributed to Thatcher instead of Brian Howard. I changed my copy accordingly (see strikeouts below), but left the quote from review intact. Two days ago PD Smith, author of the magnificent City: A Guidebook […]
Continue reading →From the muckraker troublemaker Dr. Ben Goldacre, of Bad Science fame: Medicine is broken. We like to imagine that it’s based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature surrounding a drug, when in […]
Continue reading →Writer Jo Marchant, author of Decoding the Heavens, ponders the lack of prominent science books by women. I was wondering on the same when earlier today I refreshed my memory of great science books I’d read. This isn’t for a lack of women writing about science. When I took a course in science communication at Imperial […]
Continue reading →Ta-Nahesi Coates, pondering the downfall of Jonah Lehrer, writes: [W]e now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions. We have no patience for mystery. We want the deciphering of gods. We […]
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