Ann: It’s been a fairly dreadful year, personally and nationally, and giving thanks is going to be a stretch. But even when I was a kid, I was thankless. When my grandfather said grace at Sunday dinners — “Bless, oh Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service” — I thought the […]
Conversations
Our very own Erik Vance has a brand new book out through National Geographic, and it’s called Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. Listen to my conversation with him about such varying topics as the placebo effect, that curse a brujo put on him in Mexico, how […]
May I introduce James Gleick? He’s been on staff at the New York Times, and has written seven books, including Chaos and Genius (a biography of Richard Feynman), for which he’s won impressive prizes. And he’s just published Time Travel, which Joyce Carol Oates called “another of [his] superb, unclassifiable books.” It’s a compendium of […]
This post originally ran on November 11, 2013. I rerun it now partly because I liked it and mostly because it’s a conversation with Hope Jahren and Ben Lillie. Hope has a new book out, written with her usual brilliant, nail-gun verve; Ben runs an on-going travelling theatrical anthology that’s like nothing else I’ve heard of. […]
HELEN: I like bugs. I started a Ph.D. in ants (and quit, but still think ants are awesome). I have blogged in this space about butterflies. I think the coming of the 17-year-cicadas is one of the most exciting things that happens in the world. My record is quite clear on this: me and bugs, […]
Michael: Hi Ann! After six years of teaching in NYU’s science journalism program (SHERP), and a year before that teaching at Boston University, I have decided to take a break and hand over my beginning writing, research and reporting class to someone else. What a tough decision. I love my students–so many of whom have […]
Ann: Some time ago, I got interested in why European languages so often use the same word for “story” and “history.” Every English speaker knows that having one word for two such different things — fiction and truth, respectively — is anathema. But my thinking didn’t go much farther than that, it rarely does. So […]
I met Jonathan Waldman when we were both magazine interns. We had a lot in common–we both got really into working on the magazine’s science column, and we were both really big fans of burritos. (He later sold me a shirt that featured a burrito-powered bike). When I ran into him at a conference a few […]
