The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 Page 35

by Amy Stewart


  Once constructed, the three telescopes will have synergistic strengths, says the E-ELT’s Roberto Gilmozzi. The E-ELT will specialize in zooming in to provide high-resolution images of small regions of the sky; the GMT will excel at wide-field astronomy. And the TMT will be located in a different hemisphere, observing a different sky.

  Gilmozzi, like most other astronomers interviewed for this story, thinks that had there been two telescopes instead of three, both might be nearing completion by now, at a cost hundreds of millions of dollars less. “If you don’t consider the problem of finding the money, it’s wonderful to have more than one,” he says. “Scientifically speaking, I could use 100 telescopes if I could afford to build them.”

  Unfortunately, building telescopes is just the first step. Neither the GMT nor the TMT currently has enough money to sustain operations once it is constructed. Both hope the federal government will eventually step in to assist, but Van Citters says it is not clear how much money the government will be able to contribute. The telescopes are each expected to cost tens of millions of dollars a year to operate. “That’s enough to give people nightmares,” McCray says.

  Even so, the problem of too many telescopes has a silver lining: the world could one day have three giant eyes gazing at the cosmos. This would be a big win for science, McCray says. “If this situation is a tragedy, it’s a tragedy with a small t.”

  Contributors’ Notes

  Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of the prose chapbooks Ologies (2015) and #Lovesong (2016). Her essays and journalism have been published widely online and in print. She teaches, writes, and hikes in Phoenix, Arizona.

  Bryan Christy, a lawyer and former CPA, is the founder of the Special Investigations Unit at National Geographic. He is the author of The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers. In 2014 he was named the National Geographic Society’s Explorer of the Year.

  Helene Cooper is the Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, where she shared a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for her work covering the Ebola crisis in West Africa. From 2008 to 2012 she covered the White House, and prior to that she was the Times’s diplomatic correspondent. She joined the newspaper in 2004 as the assistant editorial page editor, a position she held for two years before she ran out of opinions and returned to news. She has reported from 64 countries, from Pakistan to the Congo. Born in Monrovia, Liberia, Cooper is the author of The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography in 2009.

  Gretel Ehrlich is the author of 15 books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including The Solace of Open Spaces, Heart Mountain, This Cold Heaven, and Facing the Wave, longlisted for the National Book Award. Her books have won many awards, including the first Henry David Thoreau Prize for nature writing and the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Geographic Expeditions Council grants for travel in the Arctic, a Whiting Award, and National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Her poetry was featured on PBS NewsHour. She lives with her partner, Neal Conan, on a farm in the highlands of Hawaii and a ranch in Wyoming.

  Rose Eveleth is a journalist who covers how humans tangle with science and technology. She’s the host and producer of Flash Forward, a podcast about the future, and has covered everything from fake tumbleweed farms to sexist prosthetics.

  Amanda Gefter is an award-winning science writer specializing in fundamental physics and the philosopy of science, and the author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (2014). Her articles have been featured in Nautilus, Scientific American, Quanta, Nature, NOVA Next, BBC Earth, The Atlantic, Technology Review, and New Scientist. She was a 2012–2013 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

  Rose George is an author and journalist based in Yorkshire, England. She has written three books, on refugees, sanitation, and shipping, and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman, Scientific American, and many other publications. She is working on a book about blood. When she’s not doing that, she can usually be found running up and down hills.

  Gabrielle Glaser is an award-winning journalist whose work on mental health and medical and social trends has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Health, and many other publications. She is the author of three books, most recently Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—and How They Can Regain Control, a New York Times bestseller. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Stanford University.

  Antonia Juhasz is an energy analyst, author, and freelance investigative journalist specializing in oil. Her writing appears regularly in numerous publications, including Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Nation, Ms., The Advocate, CNN.com, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a contributing author to six books and the author of three: Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill (2011), The Tyranny of Oil (2008), and The Bush Agenda (2006). Her investigations have taken her a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and to the rainforests of the Ecuadorean Amazon, from the deserts of Afghanistan to the fracking fields of North Dakota, and to the tip of the Alaskan Arctic. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public policy from Georgetown and Brown Universities, respectively. She was a fellow of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Alexandra Kleeman was raised in Colorado and has been published in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New Yorker, and the Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She is the author of the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015) and Intimations (2016), a short story collection. She lives in Staten Island and is the 2016 recipient of the Bard Fiction Prize.

  Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Sixth Extinction, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Her three-part series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Journalism Award and a National Academies Communication Award. Those articles became the basis for Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and has received a Heinz Award and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

  Kea Krause has written for The Believer, The Toast, Vice, Narratively, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she also taught creative writing. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now resides in Queens, New York.

  Robert Kunzig is the senior environment editor for National Geographic. His article on cities was the last in the magazine’s yearlong series on global population trends. A science journalist for more than 30 years, including 14 at Discover, Kunzig has written two books, Fixing Climate (with Wallace Broecker) and Mapping the Deep, about oceanography, which won the Aventis Prize for General Science Book, the Royal Society science book prize, in 2001. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, Karen Fitzpatrick.

  Amy Leach’s work has been published in A Public Space, Tin House, Orion, The Los Angeles Review, and many other places. She has been recognized with a Whiting Award, selections in The Best American Essays, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She plays bluegrass, teaches English, and lives in Montana. Things That Are is her first book.

  Apoorva Mandavilli is founding editor and editor in chief of Spectrum. She is also an adjunct professor in New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, and cocreator of Culture Dish, an organization that aims to enhance diversity in science writing. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, Nature, and Popular S
cience, among others.

  Charles C. Mann’s most recent book, 1491, won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Keck Award for best book of the year. Mann is at work on a new project, a book about the future that makes no predictions.

  Emma Marris is a writer based in Klamath Falls, Oregon, not far from the territory of the wolf called OR7. She writes about people, nature, food, culture, and science.

  Sarah Maslin Nir has been a staff reporter for the New York Times since August 2011. She currently covers Brooklyn for the paper’s metro section. Prior to that, she covered Manhattan and Queens and worked as a rewrite reporter for late-night breaking news.

  Maddie Oatman writes and edits stories about food, culture, and the environment for Mother Jones. She also cohosts the magazine’s food and agriculture podcast, Bite. Her work has appeared in Grist, the Huffington Post, Outside, and The Rumpus, and she was a 2013 Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism. A Colorado native now based in San Francisco, she makes time for backcountry skiing and exploring the outdoors with friends.

  Stephen Ornes writes about mathematics, physics, space, and cancer research from his home in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and three children. “The Whole Universe Catalog,” which appears here, was a story three years in the making. His first book, published in 2008, was a young-adult biography of mathematician Sophie Germain, and he contributed to The Science Writers’ Handbook, published in 2013. In addition to Scientific American, his work has appeared in New Scientist, Discover, Science News for Students, Physics World, and Cancer Today. He teaches a class in science communication at Vanderbilt University.

  Rinku Patel is writing a book about immune dysfunction and holistic medicine.

  Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, was a physician and the author of many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations. His book Awakenings has inspired a number of dramatic adaptations, including a play by Harold Pinter, an Oscar-nominated film, and a documentary by Bill Morrison with music by Philip Glass. Dr. Sacks was a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and a visiting professor at Warwick University in the United Kingdom.

  Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

  Gaurav Raj Telhan is a physician and writer. He studied literature and medicine at the University of Virginia, where he was a Crispell Scholar. He was chief resident at NYPH/Columbia-Cornell University Medical Center and trained at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is a recipient of the Smith-Shanubi Scholarship at the New York State Writers Institute. Dr. Telhan practices interventional spine medicine in an academic medical center. He writes about the intersection of literature, philosophy, and medicine.

  Katie Worth is a journalist who writes about science and politics and their myriad intersections. She has covered the reason why the seemingly settled science of DNA forensics may be anything but, the role of the Whats-App messaging platform in Brazil’s response to Zika, and the psychology of the fight over climate change. Her stories have been published in Scientific American, National Geographic News, Vice, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate. She is now a digital reporting fellow at Frontline, a PBS investigative-documentary outlet based at WGBH in Boston. Her reporting for “Telescope Wars” took place while she lived in Chile, home to many of the world’s largest telescopes.

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2015

  SELECTED BY TIM FOLGER

  JAKE ABRAHAMSON

  To the Sea and Back. Sierra, January/February.

  JOEL ACHENBACH

  The Age of Disbelief. National Geographic, March.

  CAROLINE ALEXANDER

  The Invisible War on the Brain. National Geographic, February.

  GUSTAVE AXELSON

  Soul Mates. Living Bird, Autumn.

  MICHAEL BALTER

  Flight School. Audubon, January/February.

  BELLE BOGGS

  Baby Fever. Orion, November/December.

  JAMES BOYCE

  Rethinking Extinction. Harper’s Magazine, November.

  MIKE BROWN

  Why I Still Love Pluto. Popular Science, July.

  JOHN COLAPINTO

  Lighting the Brain. The New Yorker, May 18.

  KRISTA CONGER

  The Butterfly Effect. Stanford Medicine, Summer.

  GARETH COOK

  The Singular Mind of Terry Tao. The New York Times, July 24.

  TIMOTHY FERRISS

  First Glimpse. National Geographic, January.

  CHARLES FISHMAN

  5,200 Days in Space. The Atlantic, January/February.

  DOUGLAS FOX

  Life at Hell’s Gate. Scientific American, July.

  IAN FRAZIER

  Earle Power. Outside, November.

  DAVID FREEDMAN

  Birth of a Rocket. Scientific American, June.

  BRIAN GREENE

  Why He Matters. Scientific American, September.

  ERIKA CHECK HAYDEN

  Bloodline. Wired, June.

  BERND HEINRICH

  Chickadees in Winter. Natural History, March.

  WALTER ISAACSON

  How Einstein Reinvented Reality. Scientific American, September.

  WES JACKSON

  The Great Awakening. Catamaran Literary Reader, Spring.

  ROWAN JACOBSEN

  The Perfect Beast. Outside, January.

  OLIVIA JUDSON

  Luminous Life. National Geographic, March.

  RUSS JUSKALIAN

  Climate and the Khan. Discover, July/August.

  PAUL KALANITHI

  Before I Go. Stanford Medicine, Spring.

  SAM KEAN

  The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Giving. The Atlantic, May.

  PAUL KVINTA

  Overroo’d!. Outside, December.

  WINONA LADUKE

  The Thunderbirds Versus the Black Snake. Earth Island Journal, Autumn.

  MICHAEL LEMONICK

  The Archaeology of Stars. Discover, December.

  LINDA MARSA

  The People’s Scientist. Discover, November.

  MAC MCCLELLAND

  Slip Sliding Away. Audubon, March/April.

  TRISTAN MCCONNELL

  The End for Elephants?. Earth Island Journal, Summer.

  BILL MCKIBBEN

  Power to the People. The New Yorker, June 29.

  KENT MEYERS

  The Quietest Place in the Universe. Harper’s Magazine, May.

  STEVE MIRSKY

  Great Feets. Scientific American, November.

  VIRGINIA MORELL

  Feeding Frenzy. National Geographic, July.

  GEORGE MUSSER

  Is the Cosmos Random?. Scientific American, September.

  NICK NEELY

  Discovering Anna. The Southern Review, Winter.

  MICHELLE NIJHUIS

  Harnessing the Mekong. National Geographic, May.

  MICHAEL POLLAN

  The Trip Treatment. The New Yorker, February 9.

  COREY POWELL

  Europa or Bust. Popular Science, September.

  JOHN RICHARDSON

  Ballad of the Sad Climatologists. Esquire, August.

  MICHELLE ROBERTSON

  Recovery Season. Orion, September/October.

  OLIVER SACKS

  A General Feeling of Disorder. The New York Review of Books, April 2.

  CARL SAFINA

  Big Love. Orion, May/June.

  MICHAEL SCHULSON

  In Evangelical Country, an Apocalypse of Rising Seas. Insideclimatenews.org, December 8.

  JAMIE SHREEVE

  Mystery Man. National Geographic, September.

  HAMPTON SIDES

  High Science. National Geographic, June.

  TOM SIEGFRIED

  The Amateur Who Helped Einstein See the Light. Science News, October 1.

  LAUREN SLATER

  Bloodlines. The Sun, March.

  JASON SMITH

  Guest of the Great White. Catamar
an Literary Reader, Summer.

  GARY STIX

  Lifting the Curse of Alzheimer’s. Scientific American, May.

  ABE STREEP

  Coal. Guns. Freedom. The California Sunday Magazine, October 13.

  NANDHINI SUNDARESAN

  Catch and Release. Harvard Review 46.

  LEATH TONINO

  In Pursuit of Bird Poop. Tricycle.com, July 28.

  BIJAL TRIVEDI

  Broken Cables. Discover, September.

  ERICK VANCE

  An Ocean Apart. VQR, Spring.

  W. D. WETHERELL

  Outage. Appalachia, Summer/Fall.

  DEBRA WHITE PLUME

  Of Water, Starlight, and Raspberries. Earth Island Journal, Autumn.

  ELLIOTT WOODS

  Wolflandia. Outside, February.

  TIM ZIMMERMANN

  The Piscivore’s Dilemma. Outside, June.

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in The Best American Series®.

  About the Editors

  AMY STEWART, guest editor, is the award-winning author of seven books, including her acclaimed Kopp Sisters novels and the bestsellers The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. She and her husband live in Eureka, California, where they own a bookstore called Eureka Books.

 

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