The Ed's Up #117 - The 2015 Review Edition
Hi!
As 2015 draws to a close, I'm spending it in the way I began it: tired, and racing to meet some arbitrary self-imposed deadline. Thanks, brain! It's been a very unpredictable year of both professional and personal upheavals.
In August, I filed the first draft of my book, I Contain Multitudes, and I've just today finished the second version. It's very close now. I've seen the cover for the US version, and it's stunning; I'll share it when I get the chance. Galleys will go out for review in March, and the book itself will be published in early August in the US, and in early September in the UK. More details to come.
In September, I also joined the Atlantic as their first, new, and only staff science writer, working from the newly formed London Bureau (i.e. my living room). It's been a delight and an honour to work with such an amazing team. And in the meantime, I'm still blogging weekly at National Geographic as part of the peerles Phenomena cabal.
I hope you'll stick with me throughout 2016. I'll continue to bring my A-game to the Atlantic, I'll publish a very long-gestating feature for National Geographic magazine, I'll be appearing on a Radiolab segment at some point, and my book will finally become into an actual tangible object.
In the meantime, here's a selection of my favourite pieces from this year.
First my own:
As 2015 draws to a close, I'm spending it in the way I began it: tired, and racing to meet some arbitrary self-imposed deadline. Thanks, brain! It's been a very unpredictable year of both professional and personal upheavals.
In August, I filed the first draft of my book, I Contain Multitudes, and I've just today finished the second version. It's very close now. I've seen the cover for the US version, and it's stunning; I'll share it when I get the chance. Galleys will go out for review in March, and the book itself will be published in early August in the US, and in early September in the UK. More details to come.
In September, I also joined the Atlantic as their first, new, and only staff science writer, working from the newly formed London Bureau (i.e. my living room). It's been a delight and an honour to work with such an amazing team. And in the meantime, I'm still blogging weekly at National Geographic as part of the peerles Phenomena cabal.
I hope you'll stick with me throughout 2016. I'll continue to bring my A-game to the Atlantic, I'll publish a very long-gestating feature for National Geographic magazine, I'll be appearing on a Radiolab segment at some point, and my book will finally become into an actual tangible object.
In the meantime, here's a selection of my favourite pieces from this year.
First my own:
- The Dragon Autopsy
- Selfish Shellfish Cells Cause Contagious Clam Cancer
- Could Mothers’ Milk Nourish Mind-Manipulating Microbes?
- Chinese Dinosaur Had Bat-Like Wings and Feathers
- Single-Celled Creature Has Eye Made of Domesticated Microbes
- 6 Tiny Cavers, 15 Odd Skeletons, and 1 Amazing New Species of Ancient Human
- A Visit to Amsterdam’s Microbe Museum
- How Wasps Use Viruses to Genetically Engineer Caterpillars
- How Genome Sequencing Creates Communities Around Rare Disorders
- When a Genetic ID Card Is the Difference Between Life and Death
- No, Scientists Have Not Found the ‘Gay Gene’
- A Scientist's Shocking Discovery About Electric Eels
- Beefing With the World Health Organization's Cancer Warnings
- Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?
- A Venomous Fight Among Reptile Scientists
- Health Experts Are Explaining Drug-Resistant Bacteria Poorly
- Why So Blue, Tarantulas?
- That Time Europe Air-Dropped Vaccine-Loaded Chicken Heads to Bait Rabid Foxes
- What Can You Actually Do With Your Fancy Gene-Editing Technology?
- We Know Almost Nothing About the Animals That Live on Our Faces
- Clinical Genetics Has a Big Problem That's Affecting People's Lives
- How the Penguin Got its Waddle
- Consider the Sponge
- Save the Parasites (Seriously)
- The Woman Who Tweets Cheetahs
My favourite science longreads:
- The Really Big One, by Kathryn Schulz. On the earthquake that will, at some point, destroy a sizable chunk of coastal Northwest America.
- Ebola Survivors May Be the Key to Treatment—For Almost Any Disease, by Erika Check Hayden. On a literal race to get their samples on a plane.
- On Taphonomy: Digging for Dinosaurs in My Twenties, by Steve Macone. A coming-of-age story about dinosaurs, childhood, and friendship.
- Wake No More, by Virginia Hughes. On hypersomnia, a condition that makes people sleep for ages without ever feeling truly awake.
- The Boys Who Loved Birds, by Phil McKenna. Two boys from either side of the Iron Curtain, united through a love of birds, turn a no man’s land into an ecological success story.
- Is Most of Our DNA Garbage? by Carl Zimmer. A fascinating but controversial topic; Carl also cuts himself and merges with an onion.
- This Face Changes the Human Story. But How? by Jamie Shreeve. On the exciting discovery of Homo naledi, a mysterious new species of ancient human.
- The Gene Hackers, by Michael Specter. On the rise of CRISPR.
- Whale Fall, by Rebecca Giggs. On the death of a whale.
- A General Feeling of Disorder, by Oliver Sacks. On life’s need for constancy, and the disorder of sickness
- The Life of a Professional Guinea Pig, by Cari Romm. On people who earn a living by being guinea pigs in clinical trials.
- What Makes a Volcano Sacred? by Adrienne LaFrance. On the bitter debate over a new mega-telescope.
- The Last Day of Her Life, by Robin Marantz Henig. When Sandy Bem found out she had Alzheimer’s, she resolved that before the disease stole her mind, she would kill herself.
And the best books I read this year:
- Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen
- The Lagoon, by Armand Leroi
- Moby-Duck, by Donovan Hohn
- Age of Ambition, by Evan Osnos
- Republic or Death, by Alex Marshall
- The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddartha Mukherjee
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
- The Heretics, by Will Storr
- Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Dimick
- Rat Island, by William Stolzenburg
- Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz
- The Skies Belong to Us, by Brendan Koerner
- The Wild Ones, by Jon Mooallem
- Saga, by Brian K. Vaughan
- The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
- We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas
- Perfume, by Patrick Suskind
- The Book of Strange New Things, by Michael Faber
- A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James
- All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews
See you all in 2016.
-Ed
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