Greetings on the cusp of summer! I am still chugging away on my next book, digging into archives, paying visits to scientists, and otherwise trying to reconstruct the past. I'm very eager to share details, but I'll have to wait until I've lashed down this unruly manuscript.
In the meantime, I'm pleased to share a couple pieces of news. To start off, I can now share the cover of the this year's Best of Science and Nature Writing. The book comes out in October, but you can order it now.
It was an honor to serve as editor for 2023. I have assigned editions of this book for years in my writing classes, and so editing it felt not just like an honor, but as a long overdue payback. I enjoyed picking out stories that embody the state of science and nature writing today, some from writers I've long admired, and some I discovered for the first time while working on this book. (Thanks to Jaime Green for overseeing the process, even as she launched her own excellent book, The Possibility of Life.)
Meanwhile, my work at the New York Times is...evolving, shall we say?
It's shocking that ten years have passed since I published my first weekly "Matter" column for the Times. According to the tag line my editors came up with back in 2013, "Matter" would be a "weekly column about the stuff of everything." I appreciated the wide berth that afforded me. While I was able to write about what I wanted to write about, what I wanted to write about often had to do, in one way or another, with evolution--human origins, the origin of life, the origins of brains, and so on. I also stretched out to write about ecology, climate change, forever chemicals, and--for over two years--all things Covid.
After a decade, my editors and I agreed it was time to look again at what I wanted to do with the column and the rest of my work at the Times. I'm renaming the column "Origins." The tag line is now "on life, species and how things came to be." For my first column, I'm returning to one of the origins that has fascinated me for a long, long time as a journalist: the origin of birds.
(Art by Michael Rothman)
One point I sought to make in the essay was that the origin of birds did not occur at one moment in time. It was the assembly of a body plan over a very long time--long before dinosaurs took to the air. The birds in the pictures above lived 125 million years ago, and while they seem basically like the birds we see today, they actually belonged to a separate branch that vanished in the great extinctions 66 million years ago. I'll still be writing other stories, but they will appear as straight news, rather than as a column. My editors will still be giving me a lot of freedom in my choices of subjects, so if there's something in nature that you look at and wondering, "Where did that ever come from?" please reach out!
That’s all for now. Stay safe!
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