The good folks at Matter and Medium asked me how I got started writing and how I write. My answer, which they first ran at Medium (and an enormous photo), is reproduced below. See the Medium feed for other writer interviews, such as that with Alexis Madrigal (and his cat). Was there a specific moment that […]
Continue reading →On Tuesday, I posted here an excerpt of a longer transcript of an interview I did with author David Quammen recently about his writing. We covered the blessings of scissors and notebooks, the complexity of viruses and deadly diseases, the dangers of staring open-mouthed at bats, the nuances of narrative strategy, and that special moment when you suddenly […]
Continue reading →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 →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 →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 →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 […]
Continue reading →In the wilds of Tasmania and in labs in England, researchers are making some encouraging advances in their attempt to decode what may be a ticking bomb: an ugly, lethal cancer — a contagious one, a potential nightmare — that has been spreading among Tasmanian devils. As Ewen Callaway reports today at Nature: The first cases […]
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