Greetings! To kick off today's newsletter, I have a couple things to share about books.
First off, the 2023 edition of the
Best of American Science and Nature Writing hit book stores this week. I'm very honored to have had the chance to edit it this year, and I think you'll enjoy the selection of stories I picked. There's a lot in the book on Covid, of course, and about climate change, naturally--but there's lots other stuff to read, like an epic about swimming cows. “Readers will be enthralled,”
Publisher's Weekly promises. You can find the book in stores and on
Amazon,
Barnes & Noble's, and
Bookshop.
Also, as the gift-giving season approaches, I have some copies of my previous
books to autograph. They included
Life's Edge,
She Has Her Mother's Laugh, and
Soul Made Flesh. You can order them with personalized autographs via this
Google Form. Postage is included in the cost ($10 for paperbacks, $15 for hardbacks). I'm using PayPal for payment and will send them to domestic US address. (No international orders, I'm afraid.) If you have any trouble with this process, contact me
via my web site.
On the journalism front, I've published several columns since the last newsletter. Following up on a story I wrote last year about the microbiome that might lurk inside tumors, I wrote about
a new debate about how how reliable the studies are. I also wrote about the
thousands of cell types in our brains, why some mammals engage in
same-sex sexual behaviors, more bizarre surprises from the world of
contagious cancer, how human ancestors
nearly vanished about a million years ago, why
all mammals may vanish 250 million years from now, and a remarkable discovery of
ancient woodworking.
Finally, an announcement
for people around Boston. On Monday October 30, I'm coming back to the Coolidge Corner Theater for their fantastic
Science on Screen series. They'll be showing
Death Becomes Her, the 1992 dark comedy about immortality starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn. I'll give a talk beforehand about the strange science of aging and attempts to reverse it.
Details here.
That's all for now. Stay safe!
You can find out more about all my books here. If you received this email from a friend, you can subscribe to it here. You can follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Goodreads, and Facebook.