by Deborah Blum
SELECTED BY TIM FOLGER
NATALIE ANGIER
The Changing American Family. New York Times. November 25
NICHOLSON BAKER
A Fourth State of Matter. The New Yorker. July 8 and 15
RICK BASS
Answering the Call. Tricycle. Fall
ANDREW BEAHRS
Three-Stone Fire. Virginia Quarterly Review. Fall
YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
Death of a Star. Science. January 4
Mr. Borucki’s Lonely Road to Light. Science. May 3
BURKHARD BILGER
The Martian Chronicles. The New Yorker. April 22
GEORGE BLACK
Buried Treasure: The New Global Gold Rush. On Earth. Winter
PAUL BLOOM
The Ways of Lust. New York Times. November 29
EVE CONANT
Russia’s New Empire: Nuclear Power. Scientific American. October
RICHARD CONNIFF
The Grand Animal Costume Party. New York Times. October 25
LIAM DREW
The Scrotum Is Nuts. Slate. July 8
KATIE FALLON
Rebirth. River Teeth. Fall
ADAM FRANK
Welcome to the Age of Denial. New York Times. August 21
McKENZIE FUNK
Glaciers for Sale. Harper’s Magazine. July
RIVKA GALCHEN
Every Disease on Earth. The New Yorker. May 13
TED GENOWAYS
The Woman Who Loves Orcas. On Earth. Spring
DAVID GESSNER
Down by the Seaside with Dr. Doom. Outside. November
PETER GODFREY-SMITH
On Being an Octopus. Boston Review. June 3
DANIEL GOLEMAN
Rich People Just Care Less. New York Times. October 5
AARON HIRSH
Songbirds in the Suburbs. Nautilus. Fall
JESSE HIRSCH
Space Farming: The Final Frontier. Modern Farmer. September 10
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Pity Earth’s Creatures. New York Times. March 23
DAN HURLEY
Fate vs. Trait. Discover. May
ROBERT IRION
It All Began in Chaos. National Geographic. July
RAY JAYAWARDHANA
Listen Up, It’s Neutrino Time. New York Times. December 13
VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Hey, You Calling Me an Invasive Species? New York Times. September 7
ANNA KUCHMENT
The End of Orange Juice. Scientific American. March
MEINARD KUHLMANN
What Is Real? Scientific American. August
JARON LANIER
How Should We Think About Privacy? Scientific American. November
MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
Dawn of Distant Skies. Scientific American. July
CHARLES C. MANN
What If We Never Run Out of Oil? The Atlantic. May
AMANDA MASCARELLI
Growing Up with Pesticides. Science. August 16
BILL McKIBBEN
A Moral Atmosphere. Orion. March/April
KENNETH MILLER
Mushroom Manifesto. Discover. July/August
JOHN MOIR
Nature’s Blinded Visionaries. Catamaran. Spring
MITCH MOXLEY
The Rat Hunters of New York. Roads & Kingdoms. 2013
NICK NEELY
The Edge Effect. Missouri Review. Winter
WENDEE NICOLE
Game On! Ensia. March 26
MICHELLE NIJHUIS
The Ghost Commune. Aeon Magazine. October 31
Swimming in Sperm and Eggs. Slate. February 26
CAITLIN O’CONNELL-RODWELL
Mean Girls. Smithsonian. March
DENNIS OVERBYE
A Quantum of Solace. New York Times. July 1
KHARUNYA PARAMAGURU
The Battle over Global Warming Is All in Your Head. Time. August 19
COREY S. POWELL
The Sculpture on the Moon. Slate. December 16
DAVID QUAMMEN
The Wild Life of a Bonobo. National Geographic. March
BENJAMIN RACHLIN
The Accidental Beekeeper. Virginia Quarterly Review. Summer
MARY ROACH
The Marvels in Your Mouth. New York Times. March 25
LESLIE ROBERTS
The Art of Eradicating Polio. Science. October 4
JULIAN RUBINSTEIN
Operation Easter. The New Yorker, July 22.
CAMERON M. SMITH
Starship Humanity. Scientific American. January
DON STAP
Site Fidelity. Fourth Genre. Fall
MANIL SURI
How to Fall in Love with Math. New York Times. September 15
JOHN TIERNEY
The Rational Choices of Crack Addicts. New York Times. September 16
ABIGAIL TUCKER
Born to Be Mild. Smithsonian. January
ERIK VANCE
Emptying the World’s Aquarium. Harper’s Magazine. August
PAUL VOOSEN
A Brain Gone Bad. Chronicle Review. July 19
ELLIOT D. WOODS
Line in the Sand. Virginia Quarterly Review. Fall
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in The Best American Series®.
About the Editors
DEBORAH BLUM, guest editor, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of five books, including The Poisoner’s Handbook. She writes about environmental chemistry for the New York Times at Poison Pen and is a blogger for Wired at Elemental.
TIM FOLGER, series editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines.
Footnotes
1 Mirex, also known as dechlorane, is a persistent organic pollutant (POP) that is now banned by the United Nations Environmental Programme and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It is one of the original “dirty dozen” chemicals targeted for elimination by the international treaty signed at the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001.
[back]
***
2 There are five times more fire ants per acre in the United States than in their native South America. Fire ants cover 321 million acres in this country, across thirteen states and Puerto Rico, which adds up to 501,563 square miles. That’s more than Germany, France, and the UK combined, or almost one-eighth of Europe.
[back]
***
3 Lucille Devers, who was found swarmed by fire ants at the nursing home where she lived, was awarded $5.35 million by an Alabama jury. The $5.35 million award, returned on June 28, 2002, included $3.5 million in punitive damages, with Greystone and Terminix paying $1.75 million each.
[back]
***
4 Forty million people live in fire ant–infested areas, 30 to 60 percent of whom are stung annually by the ants, according to the USDA report “Integrated Management of Imported Fire Ants and Emerging Urban Pest Problems.” It is estimated that 1 percent, 400,000 people, have an anaphylactic reaction.
[back]
***
5 The ants are also drawn to electrical boxes; when one gets fried, a signal is released that brings others. The ants have been known to short out traffic lights and airport radar systems.
[back]
***
6 Use of insecticide spray averages 4 fluid ounces per 1,000 square feet, which comes to 174,240 fluid ounces—or 1,361.25 gallons—of spray per acre. This equals 436,961,250,000 gallons for the entire affected region, or nearly 662,000 Olympic-size swimming pools full of insecticide spray each year in the United States.
[back]
***
7 Several days after the phorid fly lays eggs in the thorax of a worker ant, the maggot releases a chemical that causes the ant to crumple over; it also loosens its head and front legs. The maggot then eats the contents of the ant’s head and the head falls off. Other ants carry the body to the colony’s refuse pile, including the head occupied by th
e maggot, which it uses as its pupal case. It emerges forty-five days later as an adult fly.
[back]
***
8 More than 54,000 cargo ships are hustling goods around the world, and checking all of them for fire ants has proved impossible.
[back]
***
9 Correction: The original version of this article classified more of these disasters as weather-related; as one reader pointed out, four of them were instead earthquake-related.
[back]
***
10 Stein fared better than Mock Sen, a Chinese man who a few decades earlier had been imprisoned in a boxcar and shuttled between Baltimore and Philadelphia. Neither city would accept him, and so for thirteen days he was sent back and forth, until the boxcar was opened and he was found to have solved the problem by dying from exposure.
[back]
