by Sam Kean
Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the New York Times bestselling author of Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife and Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. She regularly contributes to The Atlantic and NPR. Barb worked for NPR for 19 years (1995–2014), covering law and religion. She has received the American Women in Radio and Television Award (twice), the National Headliners Award, and the Religion Newswriters Association award for radio reporting. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Devin.
Eva Holland is a freelance writer based in Canada’s Yukon Territory. She’s a correspondent for Outside magazine, and her work has also appeared in Wired, Pacific Standard, Hakai, and many other outlets in print and online. She is working on a book about the science of fear.
Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of 11 books on science, technology, and the history of innovation, including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From, and Wonderland. He is also the host and co-creator of the PBS series How We Got to Now. He writes regularly for The New York Times Magazine and Wired. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.
Caitlin Kuehn is from small-town Wisconsin, where she graduated with a B.S. in biology and, for one whole exciting year, attended medical school. Now residing in New York City, she is advancing toward an M.F.A. from City College. Caitlin’s work has appeared in both the Bellevue Literary Review and the Texas Review.
Paul Kvinta is a contributing editor at Outside, where he writes often about wildlife and the environment. He has also written for National Geographic Adventure, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Audubon, and other publications. His work has won numerous awards and appeared in several anthologies. His story on human-elephant conflict in India won the Daniel Pearl Award, appeared in The Best American Magazine Writing 2005, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. He has been a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a Templeton Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion at Cambridge University. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, daughter, two cats, and a bearded dragon.
John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He has written four novels—The Debt of Pleasure, Mr. Phillips, Fragrant Harbour, and Capital—and two works of nonfiction: Family Romance, a memoir, and Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter; been long-listed for the Booker Prize; and been translated into 25 languages.
Rachel Leven is an environment reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization. She previously worked for Bloomberg Environment and The Hill newspaper.
J. B. MacKinnon is a freelance journalist and author, most recently of The Once and Future World: Nature as It Was, as It Is, as It Could Be. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher, is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner for general nonfiction. He has published articles in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times, and the New Republic.
Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States; author of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream; and recipient of numerous awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize.
Elena Passarello is the author of two collections of essays, Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses. Animals Strike was named a Notable Book of 2017 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and the Guardian. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award in Nonfiction, she teaches in the M.F.A. program at Oregon State University.
David Roberts has been writing about climate change, energy, and the politics where they intersect for more than a dozen years now, first at the nonprofit environmental news site Grist.org and now at Vox.com. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.
Joshua Rothman is the archive editor for The New Yorker.
Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest.
Christopher Solomon (@chrisasolomon) is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. He also writes on the environment and the outdoors for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He lives in north-central Washington State, and more of his work lives at www.chrissolomon.net. His work also appears this year in The Best American Travel Writing 2018.
Kim Todd is the author of Sparrow, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, and Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America. Her work has won the PEN/Jerard Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. She is on the nonfiction faculty of the University of Minnesota’s M.F.A. program and is at work on two projects: one on predators and one on the “girl stunt reporters” of the late nineteenth century.
Kayla Webley Adler is a senior editor at Marie Claire, where she writes and edits both the news section (called News Feed) and features. She has recently written stories on gender bias in medicine, an abortion fund hotline in Atlanta, and sex trafficking in North Dakota; edited a comprehensive how-to guide for women running for public office; and collaborated with Esquire on an ambitious project on workplace sexual harassment. Previously, Kayla worked as a staff writer at Time magazine, where she reported feature stories on innovations in education, international adoption, and school bullying, as well as contributing regularly to TIME.com and to the annual TIME 100 and Person of the Year special issues.
Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic and is based in Washington, D.C. I Contain Multitudes, his first book, is a New York Times bestseller.
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2017
NATALIE ANGIER
A Baby Wails, and the Adult World Comes Running. New York Times, September 4
CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN
There’s No Such Thing as Sound Science. FiveThirtyEight, December 6
MICHAEL BALTER
Ancient DNA Yields Unprecedented Insights into Mysterious Chaco Civilization. Scientific American, February 22
NEELA BANERJEE AND ZAHRA HIRJI
Fighting Climate Change Can Be a Lonely Battle in Oil Country, Especially for a Kid. Inside Climate News, June 13
EMILY BAZELON
The New Front in the Gerrymandering Wars: Democracy vs. Math. The New York Times Magazine, August 29
KATE BECKER
Astronomical “Rosetta Stone” to Change Our Understanding of the Universe. Nova Next, October 16
CANDICE BERND, ZOE LOFTUS-FARREN, AND MAUREEN NANDINI MITRA
America’s Toxic Prisons. Earth Island Journal, Summer
YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
Why We Lie. National Geographic, June
LYNDSIE BOURGON
How to Steal a Tree. Smithsonian, May
LAURE BRAITMAN
Dirty Birds: What It’s like to Live with a National Symbol. The California Sunday Magazine, March 30
JO CHANDLER
Amid Fear and Guns, Polio Finds a Refuge. Undark, October 16
TIMOTHY FERRIS
How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made. The New Yorker, April 20
ERIC FREEDMAN
In the Shadow of Death. Earth Island Journal, Spring
RICHARD FRIEDMAN
The World’s Most Beautiful Mathematical Equation. New York Times, April 15
NATASHA FROST
What Is It like to Be a Bee? Atlas Obscura,
December 6
JEFF GOODELL
The Doomsday Glacier. Rolling Stone, May 9
CYNTHIA GORNEY
Here’s Why Vaccines Are So Crucial. National Geographic, November
DENISE GRADY
A Shocking Diagnosis: Breast Implants “Gave Me Cancer.” New York Times, May 14
DANA J. GRAEF
Natural Disasters Are Social Disasters. Sapiens, December 13
ANYA GRONER
Metamorph. Ecotone, Spring/Summer
SHARON GUYNUP
How Syrian Zoo Animals Escaped a War-Ravaged City. National Geographic, October
JOSHUA HAMMER
The Salvation of Mosul. Smithsonian, October
JENNIFER HATTAM
Science Interrupted. Discover, September
ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Rethinking Gender. National Geographic, January
FERRIS JABR
Can Prairie Dogs Talk? The New York Times Magazine, May 12
GILLIAN JACOBS
Astronaut Peggy Whitson Is Breaking Records and Pushing the Boundaries for Women in Space. Glamour, October 30
TONI JENSEN
Women in the Fracklands: On Water, Land, Bodies, and Standing Rock. Catapult, January 3
MARTY JONES
In the West, Fishing Is More Regulated Than Buying a Gun. High Country News, October 18
OLIVIA JUDSON
What the Octopus Knows. The Atlantic, January/February
SCOTT KELLY
What It’s Like to Spend a Year in Space. National Geographic, August
NAOMI KLEIN
Season of Smoke. The Intercept, September 9
MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER
The Complicated Legacy of a Panda Who Was Really Good at Sex. FiveThirtyEight, November 28
ELIZABETH KOLBERT
Can Carbon-Dioxide Removal Save the World? The New Yorker, November 20
NICHOLAS KUSNETZ
An American Beach Story: When Property Rights Clash with the Rising Sea. Inside Climate News, December 16
ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL
If Buddhist Monks Trained AI. The Atlantic, June 29
EMMA MARRIS
A Very Old Man for a Wolf. Outside, October
MELINDA WENNER MOYER
More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows. Scientific American, October 1
HEATHER MURPHY
What Experts Know About Men Who Rape. New York Times, October 30
STEVE NADIS
The Universe According to Emily Noether. Discover, June
JUSTIN NOBEL
How a Small Town Is Standing Up to Fracking. Rolling Stone, May 22
HELEN OUYANG
Where Healthcare Won’t Go. Harper’s Magazine, June
LOIS PARSHLEY
Here Be Dragons. VQR, Winter
RACHEL PEARSON
As a Doctor, I’m Sick of All the Healthcare Freeloaders. Texas Observer, December 13
CLINTON CROCKETT PETERS
Water Bugs: A Story of Absolution. The Southern Review, Summer
TREVOR QUIRK
Sovereignty Under the Stars. VQR, Winter
EMILY RABOTEAU
Hidden Spring. Orion, May/June
ELIZABETH RUSH
The Marsh at the End of the World. Guernica, September 5
EVA SAULITIS
In the Body That Once Was Mine. The Sun, January
ERIC SCHLOSSER
Haywire. Harper’s Magazine, December
SABRINA SHANKMAN
In Alaska’s Thawing Permafrost, Humanity’s Library “Is on Fire.” Inside Climate News, November 30
JOSHUA SOKOL
Hubble Trouble. Science, March 10
IKE SWETLITZ
In a Remote West African Village, a Revolutionary Genetic Experiment Is on Its Way—If Residents Agree to It. Stat, March 14
CALVIN TRILLIN
The Irish Constellation. The New Yorker, May 1
JOHN UPTON
Breathing Fire. Climate Central, November 7
GRETCHEN VOGEL
Where Have All the Insects Gone? Science, May 10
PAUL VOOSEN
Tougher Than Hell. Science, November 24
KENNETH R. WEISS
Into the Twilight Zone. Science, March 3
SAINT JAMES HARRIS WOOD
The Nesting Ground. The Sun, October
ROBIN WRIGHT
Jasmin Moghbeli, Badass Astronaut. The New Yorker, July 2
DIMITRIS XYGALATAS
Are Religious People More Moral? The Conversation, October 23
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in the Best American series.
About the Editors
Sam Kean, guest editor, is the New York Times best-selling author of Caesar’s Last Breath, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, The Disappearing Spoon, and The Violinist’s Thumb. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and Slate, and his work has been featured on NPR’s Radiolab, Science Friday, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air.
Tim Folger, series editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines. He lives in Gallup, New Mexico.
Connect with HMH on Social Media
Follow us for book news, reviews, author updates, exclusive content, giveaways, and more.
Footnotes
* Some names have been changed to protect patient privacy.
[back]
* * *
* These machines are so sensitive that even the burbling of coffee brewing in another building can confuse the detectors, but the signals they’re searching for are so weak that even a strong gravitational wave signal, like one produced by two colliding giant black holes, only nudges the beam by a fraction of the width of a proton.
[back]
* * *
* Astronomers currently do this using “standard candles,” which include variable stars that flash like lighthouses, as well as supernovas, which are the death throes of huge, exploding stars. The idea is that if you know the standard brightness of an object, and you can tell how bright it seems to you versus how bright it’s supposed to look, that can tell you how far away it is and how fast it’s going. In a similar way, neutron-star mergers can serve as “standard sirens.”
[back]
* * *