by Mary Roach
Burkhard Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times, and other publications, and his book, Noodling for Flatheads, was a finalist for a PEN-Faulkner Award. A former senior editor of Discover and deputy editor of The Sciences, Bilger lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jennifer Nelson, and his children, Hans, Ruby, and Evangeline.
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the New York Times bestseller The Poisoner's Hand-book: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. A former president of the National Association of Science Writers, she writes for a wide variety of publications, including Slate, Time, Scientific American, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She blogs about chemistry and culture for the Public Library of Science at Speakeasy Science (blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience). A professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin, she lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, two sons, a Labrador, two ferrets, and a mouse.
Jon Cohen has been a correspondent with Science since 1990. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Outside, Slate, Technology Review, and many other publications. His books include Shots in the Dark, Coming to Term, and Almost Chimpanzee. Cohen has done mini-documentaries for Science and Slate V and contributed to "Ending AIDS," a PBS documentary based on Shots in the Dark. He earned a BA in science writing from the University of California, San Diego, in 1981. He lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.
Luke Dittrich is a contributing editor at Esquire and is currently working on a book about Henry Molaison and the history of memory science. He and his five-year-old daughter, Anwyn, live in Whitehorse, the capital of Canada's Yukon Territory.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels (The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, and Freedom), a collection of essays (How To Be Alone), and a personal history (The Discomfort Zone). He has contributed journalism and other nonfiction to The New Yorker since 1994, and more recently he has become a serious bird watcher.
Ian Frazier is the author of Great Plains, The Fish's Eye, On the Rez, and Family, as well as Coyote v. Acme, Lamentations of the Father, and, most recently, Travels in Siberia. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
David H. Freedman writes on health, science, and technology for a number of publications. He is the author of Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us, and four other books.
Atul Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He also leads Lifebox, a not-for-profit organization, and the World Health Organization's Safe Surgery Saves Lives program. He is the author of three books: Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto.
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of What the Dog Saw, Outliers: The Story of Success, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, all New York Times bestsellers. Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 1996. In 2007 he received the American Sociological Association's first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, and in 2005 he was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. Gladwell was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.
Andrew Grant is a reporter at Discover who especially enjoys writing about physics and astronomy. He is a recent graduate of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University and lives in New York City.
Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws that govern the universe. With Roger Penrose, he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied that space and time would have a beginning in the big bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify general relativity with quantum theory. One consequence of such a unification, he discovered, was that black holes should not be completely black but rather should emit radiation and eventually disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. He has written three popular books: his bestseller A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, and, most recently, The Grand Design. Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees. He was awarded the CBE in 1982 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. The recipient of many awards, medals, and prizes, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He continues to combine family life (he has three children and three grandchildren) and research into theoretical physics with an extensive program of travel and public lectures.
Amy Irvine lives in southwestern Colorado. Her second book, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, won the 2009 Orion Book Award and the 2009 Colorado Book Award.
Rowan Jacobsen writes about place and how it shapes ecosystems, cultures, cuisines, and us. His quest to capture the spirit of place and people has led him from the volcanic mountains of Mexico to the misty marshes of Alaska's Yukon Delta, from the bayous of Louisiana to the rivers of Amazonia. He has written for the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Sierra, and others. He is the author of A Geography of Oysters, which won a James Beard Award; Fruitless Fall, which received the 2009 Green Prize for Sustainable Literature; The Living Shore; and American Terroir, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by Library Journal. His newest book is Shadows on the Gulf: A Journey Through Our Last Great Wetland, which began life as "The Spill Seekers."
Christopher Ketcham has written for Harper's Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Orion, Vanity Fair, GQ CounterPunch, and many other magazines and websites. Find more of his work at www.christopherketcham.com or contact him at [email protected].
Dan Koeppel is the author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World and a contributor to Popular Mechanics, Wired, and National Geographic. He lives in Los Angeles, where he mostly travels by bike and bus. His website is www.dankoeppel.com.
Jaron Lanier, a partner architect at Microsoft Research and an innovator in residence at the Annenberg School of the University of Southern California, is the author most recently of You Are Not a Gadget.
Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, and was on the physics faculty at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of seven books, which have appeared in twenty-five languages. His book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives was a New York Times bestseller and was short listed for the Royal Society Book Award. His most recent book is The Grand Design, coauthored with Stephen Hawking. He has also written for television, including MacGyver; Star Trek, the Next Generation; and the comedy Night Court. He lives in South Pasadena, California.
Jon Mooallem has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine since 2006 and is currently working on a book, to be published by Penguin Press, about people and wild animals in America. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.
George Musser is a staff editor and writer for Scientific American, where he focuses mostly (though not exclusively) on space science and fundamental physics. He was one of the lead editors for the magazine's single-topic issue "A Matter of Time" (September 2002), which won a National Magazine Award for editorial excellence, and he coordinated the single-topic issue on sustainable development "Crossroads for Planet Earth" (September 2005), which was an Ellie finalist. In 2010 he received the Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award from the American Astronomical Society. His first book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, was published in 2008.
Jill Sisson Quinn is the author of Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape a
nd in the Lifespan. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She won the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction in 2003 and the John Burroughs Award for an Outstanding Published Nature Essay in 2011. Her essays have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Scandinavia, Wisconsin. Quinn's website is www.jillsissonquinn.com.
Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of eleven books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia, in which he describes patients struggling to adapt to various neurological conditions. His book Awakenings inspired the Oscar-nominated film of the same name and the play A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter. He practices neurology in New York City, where he is also a Columbia University Artist.
Evan I. Schwartz lives in Boston and writes about discovery and innovation. He is a former editor at BusinessWeek and Technology Review and is the author of five books, including The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit & the Birth of Television. His first article for Wired appeared in 1994.
Sandra Steingraber, PhD, is the author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, now the subject of an award-winning documentary. Her most recent book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, explores the relationship between fossil fuel extraction, including fracking, and toxic chemical exposure and concludes that the ongoing environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of family life. A scholar in residence at Ithaca College, she lives with her husband and children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where 40 percent of the land is leased to gas drillers.
Abigail Tucker has been a Smithsonian staff writer since 2008. Previously she was a general assignment reporter for the Baltimore Sun and the Post-Star, in Glens Falls, New York. She lives in Washington, DC.
Tim Zimmermann is a correspondent for Outside and the founder and editor of the weekly Adventure Fix newsletter. He is a former senior editor and diplomatic correspondent for U.S. News & World Report and the author of The Race: The First Nonstop, Round-the-World, No-Holds-Barred Sailing Competition. He has been a National Magazine Award finalist (in the category of feature writing) and has received the Thomas Renner Award (for outstanding reporting on organized crime) from Investigative Reporters and Editors. Tim lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and two children.
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2010
Selected by Tim Folger
ANIL ANANTHASWAMY
Ice Fishing for Neutrinos. Discover. March.
MICHAEL BALTER
Anthropologist Brings Worlds Together. Science. August 13.
BRUCE BARCOTT
What's the Catch? OnEarth. Summer.
RICK BASS
Into the Wild Again. OnEarth. Fall.
MATTHEW BATTLES
A New Wrinkle in Time. The Atlantic. November.
JESSICA BENKO
Mother of God, Child of Zeus. VQR. Fall.
TIM BERNERS-LEE
Long Live the Web. Scientific American. December.
JENNIFER BOGO
Digital Sight for the Blind. Popular Mechanics. November.
KENNETH BROWER
The Danger of Cosmic Genius. The Atlantic. December.
D. GRAHAM BURNETT
A Mind in the Water. Orion. May/June.
CRAIG CALLENDER
Is Time an Illusion? Scientific American. June.
ADRIAN CHO
Probing the Secrets of the Finest Fiddles. Science. June 18.
MARK COHEN
My Illegal Heart. Men's Health. April.
KATE COLEMAN
Predator. Sierra. May/June.
RICHARD CONNIFF
Unclassified. Discover. June.
All-American Monsters. Smithsonian. April.
SUSAN COISER
Band of Brothers. Audubon. May/June.
KEN CROSWELL
Heart of the Milky Way. National Geographic. December.
EDWIN DOBB
Alaska's Choice. National Geographic. December.
MARK DOWIE
Relocating Newtok. Orion. November/December.
GARETH DYKE
Winged Victory. Scientific American. July.
BLAKE EDGAR
The Power of Chocolate. Archaeology. November/December.
DOUGLAS FOX
The Insanity Virus. Discover. June.
MCKENZIE FUNK
A Mountain Transformed. National Geographic. May.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG
The Hunted. The New Yorker. April 5.
ALISON GOPNIK
How Babies Think. Scientific American. July.
PAUL GREENBERG
Time for a Sea Change. National Geographic. October.
JEROME GROOPMAN
The Plastic Panic. The New Yorker. May 31.
ELIZABETH GROSSMAN
Trading Places. Earth Island Journal. Summer.
FRED HAEFELE
Beetlemania. Outside. August.
ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
When Does Life Belong to the Living? Scientific American. September.
PAUL HOFFMAN
Unbelievable. Discover. October.
JOHN HORGAN
Reconciling Hawks and Doves: On the Possibility of Ending War. Ecotone.
NINA G. JABLONSKI
The Naked Truth. Scientific American. February.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Water Is Life. National Geographic. April.
THOMAS KIRKWOOD
Why Can't We Live Forever? Scientific American. September.
BRENDAN I. KOERNER
Red Menace. Wired. March.
ANDREW LAWLER
It's Alive. Discover. June.
Collapse? What Collapse? Societal Change Revisited. Science. November 12.
JONAH LEHRER
Under Pressure. Wired. August.
JUDITH LEWIS
The Other Big One. High Country News. February 15.
PRISCILLA LONG
My Brain on My Mind. The American Scholar. Winter.
BARRY LOPEZ
An Intimate Geography. Portland. Summer.
BRUNO MADDOX
The Body Shop. Discover. May.
CURTIS W. MAREAN
When the Sea Saved Humanity. Scientific American. August.
LINDA MARSA
The Hot Zone. Discover. December.
SUSAN MCGRATH
River of Raptors. Audubon. September/October.
BILL MCKIBBEN
The Only Way to Have a Cow. Orion. March/April.
LAWRENCE MILLMAN
Farthest North. The Atlantic. November.
MICHELLE NIJHUIS
Prodigal Dogs. High Country News. February 15.
ALISA OPAR
Smoke Signals. Audubon. May/June.
BEN PAYNTER
Welcome to Armageddon. Wired. September.
ADAM PIORE
The Bionic Man. Discover. November.
MATTHEW POWER
The Solution. VQR Fall.
ANNIE PROULX
A Year of Birds. Harper's Magazine. December.
DAVID QUAMMEN
Great Migrations. National Geographic. November.
HUGH RAFFLES
A Conjoined Fate. Orion. January/February.
HANNA ROSIN
Earthbound. The Atlantic. September.
SHERMAN APT RUSSELL
True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist. OnEarth. Spring.
OLIVER SACKS
A Man of Letters. The New Yorker. June 28.
MARK SCHAPIRO
Conning the Climate. Harper's Magazine. February.
JAMIE SHREEVE
Evolutionary Road. National Geographic. July.
BRYAN SMITH
Your Lethal Lawn. Men's Health. June.
RICHARD STONE
Home, Home Outside the Range? Science. September 24.
GINGER STRAND
The Economics of Estuary. Orion. Septem
ber/October.
PATRICK SYMMES
The Beautiful and the Dammed. Outside. June.
GARY TAUBES
Live Long and Prosper. Discover. October.
JOHN TRAVIS
In Search of Sitting Bull. Science. October 8.
ABIGAIL TUCKER
The Truth About Lions. Smithsonian. January.
LOGAN WARD
The Race to Save the Bats. Popular Mechanics. December.
CHARLES WOHLFORTH
Conservation and Eugenics. Orion. July/August.
Footnotes
* OSHA completed its investigation into the death of Dawn Brancheau in August 2010 and cited SeaWorld for failing to protect trainers adequately in their work with killer whales "from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm." In addition to fining SeaWorld $75,000, OSHA stipulated that the only way it could create an acceptably safe work environment would be to end close work with killer whales or adopt a number of safety measures, such as keeping physical barriers between trainers and killer whales, that would fundamentally alter SeaWorld's shows. SeaWorld flatly rejected OSHA's conclusions and is appealing its citations.