Friday's Elk, October 31, 2018 [Get Out the Goodreads Vote Edition!]

Goodreads Choice Award--Can I Get Your Vote?
I'm sending this newsletter out a couple days early because of some late-breaking developments. She Has Her Mother's Laugh has been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award in the Science & Technology category. This is a wonderful honor, because the award is the only book prize out there entirely determined by readers, rather than a judging panel made of critics, media, etc. (Not that those aren't great, too!) You can now vote for your favorite nominees in each category. The opening voting round ends on November 4. Here's the link. Thanks!
  In Other She Has Her Mother's Laugh News
1. Dutton has put together an elegantly designed book club guide that you can download from my web site

2. Publisher's Weekly put She Has Her Mother's Laugh on their list of the Best Ten Books of 2018.

3. Three new reviews came out. The London Review of Books calls the book "an unlikely page-turner." In the Longview, Texas, News-Journal, columnist Frank Pool writes, "I just finished the best science book I’ve read in years." And the Guardian writes, "The book offers clear insights into a fast-moving area, and asks big questions. Scientists can eradicate diseases, alter DNA and change human heredity. Should they? What could be at stake if they get it wrong?"
  Fake News, Heredity, and Other Talk Updates
1. I'm back from a string of talks, some of which were reported on. Here's a story about my lecture on heredity at Colorado State University. At Mount Holyoke College, I talked about science writing in the age of fake news (featuring the original master of fake science news, P.T. Barnum). And here's a story that covers a talk I gave at CSI Con in Las Vegas on the top misconceptions about heredity.

2. I had a great conversation earlier this month with anthropologist Jennifer Raff and Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz about heredity, ancestry, and how we use both to define ourselves. You can now watch the video.
  Elizabeth Warren's DNA, Wildfire Refuges, and More Columns
It was a busy month on the science news front over at the New York Times:

1. I wrote about Elizabeth Warren's DNA, explaining how researchers use genetic material to learn about people's ancestors--and what that does and does not mean for people's own identity. The day that piece came out, a GOP operative and a Wall Street Journal pundit used my reporting on genetic ancestry to make distorted accusations against the senator. So I wrote a fact-checking tweet storm. That got people's attention, so I turned the tweets into a fleshed-out essay, which appeared in the Sunday Review. With tens of millions of people looking at genetic tests for clues to their ancestors, the week's events resonate far beyond one political conflict.

2. It turns out that healthy cells are riddled with mutations in genes strongly linked to cancer. So where is the line between health and disease?

3. This year's ravaging wildfires left some refuges behind, as all fires do. Scientists suspect refuges are vital to the long-term well-being of ecosystems. But climate change could wipe many of them out.

  Upcoming Talks  

November 2, 2018 West Stockbridge, Massachusetts: Stanmeyer Gallery

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News

November 13, 2018 Waterstone's, London: An Evening With The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlist

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

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