The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015
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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 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 many “Profiles,” of subjects including Lance Armstrong, the ethicist Peter Singer, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, Manolo Blahnik, and Miuccia Prada. Specter went to The New Yorker from the New York Times, where he had been a roving foreign correspondent based in Rome. From 1995 to 1998 Specter served as the Times’ Moscow bureau chief. He went to the Times from the Washington Post, where from 1985 to 1991 he covered local news before becoming the Post’s 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, first for his 2001 article about AIDS, “India’s Plague,” and second for his 2004 article “The Devastation,” about the ethics of testing HIV vaccines in Africa. He received the 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Award for his 2001 article “Rethinking the Brain,” on 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 Annual 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 splits his time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Meera Subramanian is an award-winning journalist whose work has been published in the New York Times, Nature, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is also the author of A River Runs Again: India’s Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka (2015) and an editor for the online literary magazine Killing the Buddha. She lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Find her at www.meerasub.org and @meeratweets.
Kim Todd is the author of Sparrow; Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis; and Tinkering with Eden: a Natural History of Exotic Species in America. Her work has received the PEN/Jerard Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and she teaches literary nonfiction in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota. “Curious” was written with the help of a residency at the Mesa Refuge.
David Wolman is an award-winning journalist, author, and speaker. He is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of four works of nonfiction: Firsthand, The End of Money, Righting the Mother Tongue, and A Left-Hand Turn Around the World. He has also written for such publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Time, Nature, and Outside. He lives in Oregon with his wife and two children. Follow him @davidwolman.
Barry Yeoman is a freelance journalist who specializes in putting a human face on complex issues, including science and the environment. The winner of numerous national awards, he was named by Columbia Journalism Review as one of nine investigative reporters who are “out of the spotlight but on the mark.” His writing appears in Audubon, onEarth, Saturday Evening Post, and The American Prospect and can be read at barryeoman.com. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2014
SELECTED BY TIM FOLGER
SANDRA ALLEN
How Climate Change Will End Wine as We Know It. BuzzFeed, November 20.
BRETT ANDERSON
Louisiana Loses Its Boot. Medium, September 8.
NANCY C. ANDREASEN
Secrets of the Creative Brain. The Atlantic, July/August.
NATALIE ANGIER
Too Much of a Good Thing. The New York Times, September 22.
PETER B. BACH
The Day I Started Lying to Ruth. The New York Times, May 6.
DAVID P. BARASH
God, Darwin, and My Biology Class. The New York Times, September 27.
MARCIA BARTUSIAK
Dark Matters. Natural History, January.
RICK BASS
The Constant Garden. Audubon, November/December.
KENNETH BROWER
Quicksilver. National Geographic, March.
CHIP BROWN
Kayapo Courage. National Geographic, January.
KENNETH CHANG
A Lost and Found Nomad Helps Solve the Mystery of a Swimming Dinosaur. The New York Times, September 11.
EMILY EAKIN
The Excrement Experiment. The New Yorker, December 1.
GREGG EASTERBROOK
What Happens When We All Live to 100? The Atlantic, October.
MIEKE EERKINS
Seep. Creative Nonfiction, Spring.
DOUGLAS FOX
The Dust Detectives. High Country News, December 22.
EDWARD FRENKEL
The Lives of Alexander Grothendieck, a Mathematical Visionary. The New York Times, November 25.
TED GENOWAYS
Hog Wild. On Earth, Spring.
DANA GOODYEAR
Death Dust. The New Yorker, January 20.
DENISE GRADY
An Ebola Doctor’s Return from Death. The New York Times, December 7.
BRUCE GRIERSON
What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set? The New York Times, October 22.
LIZA GROSS
Face of Hope. Discover, September.
ELIZABETH GROSSMAN
Banned in Europe, Safe in the U.S. Ensia, June 9.
LISA M. HAMILTON
The Quinoa Quarrel. Harper’s Magazine, May.
ALAN HEATHCOCK
Zero Percent Water. Medium, September 21.
ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms. Medium, July 21.
GEORGE JOHNSON
Why Everyone Seems to Have Cancer. The New York Times, January 4.
JAMES L. JOHNSON
Frank Malina: America’s Forgotten Rocketeer. IEEE Spectrum, July 31.
JONATHON KEATS
Playing the Meteorite Market. Discover, June.
RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN
A Star in a Bottle. The New Yorker, March 3.
ELIZABETH KOLBERT
Eclipse. Orion, November/December.
ROBERT KUNZIG
Carnivore’s Dilemma. National Geographic, November.
TOM LEVITT
What’s the Beef? Earth Island Journal, Winter.
SHARON LEVY
The Bees’ Needs. On Earth, Summer.
JANE BRAXTON LITTLE
The Wolf Called OR7. Appalachia, Winter/Spring.
PHIL MCKENNA
New Life for the Artificial Leaf. Ensia, November 17.
REBECCA MEAD
Starman. The New Yorker, February 17 & 24.
GREG MILLER
Inside the Strange New World of DIY Brain Stimulation. Wired, May.
PETER MILLER
Digging Utah’s Dinosaurs. National Geographic, May.
NICK NEELY
Slow Flame. Harvard Review Online, April 22.
MICHELLE NIJHUIS
Caviar’s Last Stand. Food and Environment Reporting Network, July 28.
JENNIFER OULLETTE
Multiverse Collisions May Dot the Sky. Quanta Magazine, November 10.
STEPHEN ORNES
Archimedes in the Fence. The Last Word on Nothing, May 23.
DENNIS OVERBYE
A Picture Captures Planets Waiting to Be Born. The New York Times, December 18.
ROSS PERLIN
Endangered Speakers. n+1, Spring.
TOM PHILPOTT
California Goes Nuts. Mother Jones, November/December.
STEPHEN PORDER
World Changers. Natural History, November.
LEWIS PUGH
Swimming Throu
gh Garbage. The New York Times, September 28.
ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE
Free-Range Kids. Orion, November/December.
SHRUTI RAVINDRAN
What Solitary Confinement Does to the Brain. Aeon, February 27.
JULIE REHMEYER
The Immortal Devil. Discover, May.
JIM ROBBINS
Building an Ark for the Anthropocene. The New York Times, September 27.
SHARMAN APT RUSSELL
Meet the Beetles. Orion, November/December.
NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR
The Future Looks Bleak for Bones. The Atlantic, December 23.
MEGAN SCUDELLARI
Never Say Die. Medium, May 7.
JESSICA SEIGEL
America’s Getting the Science of Sun Exposure Wrong. Nautilus, Fall.
CHRIS SOLOMON
Rethinking the Wild. The New York Times, July 6.
MICHAEL SPECTER
Against the Grain. The New Yorker, November 3.
Partial Recall. The New Yorker, May 19.
DAWN STOVER
Living on a Carbon Budget: Or You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 5.
EDWARD STRUZIK
The End and Beginning of the Arctic. Ensia, December 2.
DEB OLIN UNFERTH
Cage Wars. Harper’s Magazine, November.
ERIK VANCE
Gods of Blood and Stone. Scientific American, July.
On Call in the Wild. Discover, March.
PAUL VOOSEN
Striving for a Climate Change. The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3.
Wasteland. National Geographic, December.
We Are All Mutants. The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24.
SCOTT WEIDENSAUL
Have Lemmings, Will Travel. Audubon, March/April.
E. O. WILSON
On Free Will. Harper’s Magazine, September.
NATALIE WOLCHOVER
In a Grain, a Glimpse of the Cosmos. Quanta Magazine, June 13.
A New Physics Theory of Life. Quanta Magazine, January 6.
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in The Best American Series®.
About the Editors
REBECCA SKLOOT’s award-winning science writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was an instant New York Times bestseller. It was named a best book of 2010 by more than sixty media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly and NPR, and by the National Academies of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others. Skloot is currently writing a book about humans, animals, science, and ethics.
TIM FOLGER, series editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines.
Footnotes
* Opposition was filed also by Syngenta, the Swiss biotech company and direct competitor to Monsanto. Their objection followed the same general logic as the coalition’s: that the broccoli under protection was created by an “essentially biological process.” It was ironic, then, that they had just applied for their own patents in the United States and the European Union, covering a broccoli plant distinguished in part by a “protruding” head that makes harvest easier.
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