Last year I talked to a primatologist in his mid-80s, still sharp, still in his office most days, a pleasant spot in California, surrounded by his books and by younger colleagues who adored him. He wore khakis and a red plaid shirt and desert boots — I didn’t know you could even find desert boots […]
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 →Australia RadioNational’s “All in the Mind” program has long been a favorite of mine, so it was a pleasure last week to be on the program discussing the up- and downsides of so-called ‘orchid genes’ — the gene variants long associated with vulnerability to things like depression, but now increasingly seen as producing not just […]
Continue reading →When I first read Rebecca Skloot’s’ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks last February, I, like millions of others who have read it, found myself enthralled with and amazed at the remarkable story that Skloot had collected and told. As a writer, I found myself intensely curious about two things: how Skloot decided on the book’s […]
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