Friday's Elk, November 19, 2019: The One More Final Vote Edition!

Goodreads Choice Award--The Final Round
Thanks to your support, She Has Her Mother's Laugh is now a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award! I'm writing to ask for your vote one last time, this time for all the marbles. You can make your pick till November 26. Here's where you can cast your vote. Thanks again!

  Amazon's Best-Of Lists
A double hit of nice news: Amazon selected She Has Her Mother's Laugh for their Top 100 Books of the Year, as well as their Best Science Books of 2018.
 
Back From London
My wife and I spent a few delightful days in London this past week for the Baillie Gifford Prize For Nonfiction. The six finalists got together Tuesday to give a public talk about our books. Listening to the other authors, I could imagine any of them winning, and the following evening we found out that the actual winner was Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, for his excellent book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. Plokhy combed through Ukraine KGB archives and other sources to put together his new chronicle of this terrifying disaster. The details of this very human failure remain chilling decades later.
  Heredity On TV--And Other Interviews
I'm on this week's episode of Open Mind, which airs on many PBS stations. I talked with host Alexander Heffner about genes and inheritance. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

If you prefer audio over video, check out the latest episode of the Sapiens podcast, a great new series about anthropology. They dedicate the full episode to a conversation I had with host Chip Colwell about She Has Her Mother's Laugh.

And if print is your game, here's an interview in Penn Today about the dangers of fake news to science reporting, plus a Q/A with LitHub about the Baillie Gifford Award, including the best writing advice I ever got.
 
Columns: The Oldest Pictures of Animals, the Peopling of the Americas, and More
Before I hit the road, here's what I reported on this month for New York Times:

1. Deep in the rainforests of Borneo are caves decorated with pictures of animals. It turns out that people started making these images over 40,000 years ago--meaning they are the oldest evidence of figurative art on Earth. For my column, I explore what this new finding tells us about the development of human culture.

2. How did people first spread across the Americas? In the past few years, geneticists have sequenced hundreds of ancient genomes from Alaska to Chile. This DNA is offering some new clues about ghost populations and previously unknown waves of people on the move from continent to continent. For my column, I try to make sense of all the new findings.

3. The search for a better flu vaccine continues. Here's a piece I wrote about a radically different approach to protecting us from a virus that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.

  Upcoming Talks

February 16, 2019 Washington DC AAAS Topical Lecture: "Heredity: Our Defining Mystery"

February 20, 2019 Connecticut College, New London CT: “The Deep History of Global Affairs”

NEW-->February 28, 2019 Harvard Museum of Natural History: A Conversation with David Quammen. Details to come.

March 7, 2019 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thomas M. Siebel Lecture Series in Science and Society. Details to come.

NEW-->April 9, 2019 Wellesley College. Mayer Lecture. Details to come.

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

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Best wishes, Carl