The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012

by Dan Ariely

  Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favorite book of 2011. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and the Paris Review, as well as scientific journals such as Cognitive Science and literary journals such as AGNI, Gulf Coast, and Best New Poets. He has been featured on The Charlie Rose Show, The Daily Show, and NPR’s Radiolab and has lectured at Google, Microsoft, and the Santa Fe Institute. Christian holds degrees in philosophy, computer science, and poetry from Brown University and the University of Washington.

  Jason Daley is a freelance writer specializing in natural history, science, the environment, and travel. His work has appeared in Discover, Wired, Popular Science, Outside, and other magazines.

  Joshua Davis (www.joshuadavis.net) is a contributing editor at Wired. His book The Underdog chronicles his experiences as the lightest man to ever compete at the US Sumo Open.

  David Dobbs writes for The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Nature, and other publications. He is currently writing a book with the working title The Orchid and the Dandelion, which explores the notion that the genes and traits underlying some of our most torturous mood and behavior problems may also generate some of our greatest strengths and contentment. He is the author of four previous books, most recently the number-one best-selling Kindle Single “My Mother’s Lover,” which unearths a secret affair his mother had with a doomed flight surgeon in World War II. He blogs on culture, science, and literature at Neuron Culture.

  David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action (EaglemanLab.net) and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law (NeuLaw.org). He is best known for his work on time perception, vision, synesthesia, social neuroscience, and neurolaw. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a council member in the World Economic Forum, and a New York Times best-selling author, published in twenty-seven languages.

  Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances, which won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her stories and essays have appeared in such publications as Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, and she was recently named to The New Yorker’s list of Twenty Writers Under Forty.

  Thomas Goetz is the executive editor of Wired and the author of The Decision Tree: A Manifesto for Personalized Medicine. He holds a master’s degree in public health and writes often about the confluence of technology and health care. In particular, his work examines how scalable technologies can help disseminate powerful ideas that improve and save lives. His next book, The Remedy, will explore the emergence of the germ theory of disease and the unexpected role of Sherlock Holmes in the attempt to cure tuberculosis. It will be published in 2013.

  Jerome Groopman holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is the chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He received his BA from Columbia College summa cum laude and his MD from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He served his internship and residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and his specialty fellowships in hematology and oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Children’s Hospital/Sidney Farber Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School, in Boston. He serves on many scientific editorial boards and has published more than 150 scientific articles. In 2000 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He writes regularly about biology and medicine for lay audiences as a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2011 he coauthored, with Dr. Pamela Hartzband, Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You.

  Thomas Hayden has been an oceanographer, a staff writer at Newsweek and US News & World Report, and a freelance writer for many publications, from National Geographic to Manure Matters. He teaches science and environmental writing in Stanford University’s School of Earth Sciences and Graduate School in Journalism. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Science Writer’s Handbook and blogs about science with friends at The Last Word on Nothing (www.lastwordonnothing.com).

  Virginia Hughes is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She writes for a variety of publications, including Nature, New Scientist, Popular Science, Scientific American, and the delightfully quirky science blog The Last Word on Nothing (www.lastwordonnothing.com).

  David Kirby, a regular contributor to the Huffington Post since 2005, has been a professional journalist for twenty years and was also a contract writer for The New York Times, where he covered health and science, among many other topics. He has written for several national magazines and was a correspondent in Mexico and Central America from 1986 to 1990. Kirby worked in New York City politics and medical research, including at the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR). His third book, Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity, was published in July 2012. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” from which the book was adapted, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine-writing award and a National Academies communications award. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and has received a Heinz Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  Robert Kunzig is the senior environment editor for National Geographic. His article on cities was the last in the magazine’s yearlong series on global population trends. A science journalist for thirty years, including fourteen at Discover, Kunzig has written two books, Fixing Climate (with Wallace Broecker) and Mapping the Deep, about oceanography, which won the Aventis/Royal Society prize in 2000. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, Karen Fitzpatrick.

  Mark McClusky, the special projects editor for Wired, leads the magazine’s editorial efforts on new platforms, including its iPad and other tablet editions. From 2005 to 2010, McClusky was the magazine’s senior editor for products, directing all coverage of gear and gadgets. He also served as editor of the newsstand-only Wired Test magazines and was the founding editor of Playbook, Wired’s sports technology blog. McClusky, a coauthor of Alinea with the Michelin three-star chef Grant Achatz, is an avid cook who has studied at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and two daughters.

  Mark W. Moffett is the author of three books, most recently Adventures Among Ants, in which he investigates the organization of ant societies. He received his doctorate from Harvard under the environmentalist E. O. Wilson and is currently a research associate in entomology at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian). Moffett received the Explorers Club’s Lowell Thomas Medal, a Distinguished Explorer Award from the Roy Chapman Andrews Society, Yale’s Poynter Fellowship for Journalism, and Harvard’s Bowdoin Prize for writing. Among his many adventures in more than one hundred countries, he has climbed the world’s tallest tree, descended into sinkholes a quarter-mile deep to find new frog species, and placed a scorpion on Conan O’Brien’s face. Currently he is studying issues of identity in the formation of animal societies.

  Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba and handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana. She’s been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo and swum with pink dolphins, electric eels, and piranhas in the Amazon. She is now at work on Soul of the Octopus, her nineteenth book.

  Michael Roberts is the senior executive editor at Outside, where he has been on staff since 2000. In addition to editing and writing feature stories, he manages the brand’s iPad app, Outside+ Magazine. Before turning to journalism, Roberts was employed as a naturalist in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and as a field biologist in Ecuador, Costa Rica, Alaska,
and Baja. He now lives, works, and plays in Marin County, California, with his wife and two sons.

  John Seabrook is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of three books, including Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture and Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

  Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. He writes often about science, technology, and global public health. Since joining the magazine, he has written several articles about the global AIDS epidemic, as well as articles about avian influenza, malaria, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, synthetic biology, the attempt to create edible meat in a lab, and the debate over the meaning of our carbon footprint. He has also published profiles of many subjects, including Lance Armstrong, the ethicist Peter Singer, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, Manolo Blahnik, and Miuccia Prada. Before moving to The New Yorker, Specter had been a roving foreign correspondent for the New York Times, based in Rome. From 1995 to 1998, Specter served as the Times Moscow bureau chief. Before that he worked at the Washington Post, where he covered local news from 1985 to 1991, then became the national science reporter and, later, the newspaper’s New York bureau chief. Specter has twice received the Global Health Council’s annual Excellence in Media Award, for his 2001 article about AIDS, “India’s Plague,” and for his 2004 article “The Devastation,” about the ethics of testing HIV vaccines in Africa. He also received the 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Award for his 2001 article “Rethinking the Brain,” about the scientific basis of how we learn. His most recent book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, received the 2009 Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking, presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In 2011 Specter won the World Health Organization’s Stop TB Partnership Award for Excellence in Reporting for his New Yorker article “A Deadly Misdiagnosis,” about the dangers of inaccurate TB tests in India, which has the highest rate of TB in the world. Specter lives in New York City.

  Bijal P. Trivedi is a freelance writer whose work has taken her from the hidden vaults of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Serengeti Plains to Moscow’s Star City, where she joined space tourism entrepreneurs on the “Vomit Comet” for astronaut training. Her work has appeared in more than twenty-five publications, including New Scientist, Wired, Discover, Scientific American, The Economist, National Geographic, and Air & Space. Her story “Slimming for Slackers” won the Wistar Institute Science Journalism Award. “Life on Hold,” also written for New Scientist, won the 2005–2006 Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award. “The Rembrandt Code,” published in Wired, was tagged “outstanding story on any subject: print” by the South Asian Journalists Association. Trivedi has taught in New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. She was born in the UK, raised in Australia, and now lives with her husband, Chad Cohen, and her two wonderful kids in Washington, DC.

  Carl Zimmer is the author of twelve books, including Parasite Rex and Soul Made Flesh, and coauthor, with the biologist Doug Emlen, of the textbook Evolution: Making Sense of Life. He writes frequently for the New York Times, National Geographic, Slate, and Discover, where he is a contributing editor. He has earned numerous awards, including prizes from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences, for his work. He is a lecturer at Yale University and lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife, Grace Zimmer, and their two daughters.

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2011

  SELECTED BY TIM FOLGER

  NATALIE ANGIER

  Path of Discovery, Lighted by a Bug Man’s Insights. New York Times, April 4.

  So Much More Than Plasma and Poison. New York Times, June 6.

  NICHOLAS BAKALAR

  Study of Vision Tackles a Philosophy Riddle. New York Times, April 25.

  MARCIA BARTUSIAK

  Chemistry Lesson. Natural History, November.

  Ye Olde Black Hole. Natural History, September.

  ELIF BATUMAN

  Natural Histories. The New Yorker, October 24.

  BRUCE BARCOTT

  Arctic Fever. OnEarth, Spring.

  Totally Psyched for the Full-Rip Nine. Outside, August.

  LAURA BEIL

  The Magic Bullet for Prostate Cancer. Men’s Health, March.

  YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

  The Fall and Rise of Douglas Prasher. Discover, April.

  Whales’ Grandeur and Grace, Up Close. New York Times, April 18.

  GEORGE BLACK

  Coal on a Roll. OnEarth, Fall.

  Life and Death in a Dry Land. OnEarth, Winter.

  BRENDAN BORRELL

  The Gloucester Fish War. Bloomberg Businessweek, November 22.

  The Great Pumpkin. Smithsonian, October.

  JAMES CAMPBELL

  Star Power. Outside, December.

  KENNETH CHANG

  With “Coolest Job Ever” Ending, Astronauts Seek Next Frontier. New York Times, April 23.

  ADRIAN CHO

  Particle Physicists’ New Extreme Teams. Science, September 16.

  TOM CLYNES

  Scientist in a Strange Land. Popular Science, October.

  RICHARD CONNIFF

  Dying for Discovery. New York Times, January 16.

  JENNIFER COUZIN-FRANKEL

  Aging Genes: The Sirtuin Story Unfolds. Science, December 2.

  BRIAN DOYLE

  The Creature Beyond the Mountains. Orion, September–October.

  GARETH DYKE

  The Dinosaur Baron of Transylvania. Scientific American, October.

  TIMOTHY EGAN

  Sometimes the Bear Gets You. New York Times, September 29.

  MARTIN ENSERINK

  Can This DNA Sleuth Help Catch Criminals? Science, February 18.

  HELEN EPSTEIN

  Flu Warning: Beware the Drug Companies! New York Review of Books, May 12.

  MICHAEL FINKEL

  The Volcano Next Door. National Geographic, April.

  DOUGLAS FOX

  Omens from a Vanished Sea. High Country News, October 31.

  Super Storms. Popular Mechanics, October.

  ERIC FREEDMAN

  Extinction Is Forever. Earth Island, Autumn.

  HOWARD W. FRENCH

  E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything. The Atlantic, November.

  TED GENOWAYS

  Tar Sands Showdown in the Nebraska Sandhills. www.onearth.org, September 30.

  DAVID GESSNER

  Spoiling Walden: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cape Wind. www.onearth.org, November 29.

  JUSTIN GILLIS

  A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself. New York Times, June 4.

  ANNE GISLESON

  Shifting: Cycles of Loss on a Sinking Coast. Ecotone, Fall.

  DAVID GRIMM

  Are Dolphins Too Smart for Captivity? Science, April 29.

  STEPHEN S. HALL

  Iceman Unfrozen. National Geographic, November.

  SUE HALPERN

  Over the High-Tech Rainbow. New York Review of Books, November 24.

  ADAM HIGGINBOTHAM

  Half-Life. Wired, May.

  JOSEPH HOOPER

  The Man Who Would Stop Time. Popular Science, August.

  ROBERT IRION

  Something New Under the Sun. Smithsonian, April.

  FREDERICK KAUFMAN

  The Second Green Revolution. Popular Science, February.

  MARC KAUFMAN

  Space Odyssey: Scientists Go to the Extremes of the Earth to Divine the Secrets of Extraterrestrial Life. Washington Post, February 27.

  JONATHON KEATS

  The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram. Wired, October.

  JEFFREY KLUGER

  Little Women. Time, October 31.

  DAN KOEPPEL

  Let There Be LED. Wired, September.

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT

  The Acid Sea. N
ational Geographic, April.

  KAI KUPFERSCHMIDT

  Sharp Insights and a Sharp Tongue. Science, November 4.

  JOHAN LEHRER

  The Truth Wears Off. The New Yorker, December 13.

  ALAN LIGHTMAN

  The Accidental Universe. Harper’s Magazine, December.

  J. B. MacKinnon

  Wisdom in the Wild. Orion, May–June.

  MATTHEW MCGOUGH

  The Lazarus File. The Atlantic, June.

  Maureen Nandini Mitra

  Ready or Not. Earth Island Journal, Autumn.

  MICHELLE NIJHUIS

  Crisis in the Caves. Smithsonian, July–August.

  EMILENE OSTLIND

  The Perilous Journey of Wyoming’s Migrating Pronghorn. High Country News, December 26.

  MIKE PEED

  We Have No Bananas. The New Yorker, January 10.

  MICHAEL S. REIDY