| Title | : | The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1328987809 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781328987808 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 |
| Publication | : | First published October 2, 2018 |
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018 Reviews
-
I love this series. Yes, I know it’s all previously published and can be found online at the source. In theory, I read these essays along with lots of other excellent writing each month. But that hasn’t happened, so I’ll have to trust in the editors’ selections once again.
Forward by series editor, Tim Folger, he is passing the torch to Jaime Green after 17 years in the job. He leaves us with a proposed Quack Award. After careful consideration of the many excellent candidates, the award goes to Scott Pruitt. While Pruitt was previously better known for suing the EPA, he now heads it. See Rachel Leven’s “A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Scott Pruitt’s Dysfunctional EPA” for more.
The Introduction is by guest editor, Sam Kean, with a tale of one cat too many. It’s too bad that he didn’t provide the title or author of the animal behavior book he was reading.
“Pleistocene Park” by Ross Andersen from The Atlantic
Bison and musk ox at the Pleistocene Park (
www.kickstarter.com/projects/90748497...)
An update on the project to resurrect mammoths by reverse engineer elephant DNA
My doubts don’t weigh in here. It’s in the hopper along with similar projects, bring back the aurochs and probably others that I haven’t heard about. “Gene editing is the easy part.” I keep thinking of Crichton’s mean little elephant. Behavior may not follow form. And, “If you were an anthropologist specializing in human ecological relationships, you might well conclude that one of our distinguishing features as a species is an inability to coexist peacefully with elephants.”
Sergey and Nikita Zimov: The Russian Scientists Bringing Back the Ice Age - The Atlantic
“It’ll Take an Army to Kill the Emperor” by Jacqueline Detwiler from Popular Mechanics
A US tour of cancer research with interludes like this:What’re ya down here for? Asks an older gentleman at the bar of a tourist barbecue joint near my hotel in Memphis. I’m halfway through a plate of pickles and dry-rubbed ribs. I explain that I’ve spent all spent all day at St. Jude.
“God bless you,” he says. “I couldn’t do it.” The man is from Texas—he works in shipping or packing something or other.
The bartender, a bubbly twenty-three=year-old, offers the gentleman another beer. “You know, I was treated at St. Jude. Diagnose at ten. Cured at thirteen,” he says, beaming.
“Was it awful?” I ask. “Getting cancer as a kid?”
“Naw, I loved going to St. Jude. I remember I looked forward to school being over so I could go over to the hospital and get chemo. Your doctors are so happy to see you.”
The bartender is studying to be a truck driver so he can visit California. He’s not sure if he’ll settle down there, but it seems nice.
The man from Texas looks at the bartender hard for a good minute, says, “You’re a lucky man, son.”
“The Squeeze: Silicon Valley Reinvents the Breast Pump” by Sophie Brickman from California Sunday Magazine
It’s about time! The price needs to come down. Women in the US are expected to work and nurse their babies.
“The Case Against Civilization” by John Lanchester from The New Yorker
Technology and its Discontents.“I love my laptop and my iPhone and my Echo and my GPS, but the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—date from the thirteenth century: my glasses. Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. That’s technology, not science.”
Well, soap doesn’t hurt but, I believe he’s assuming plumbing in good working order.
“Cancer’s Invasion Equation” by Siddhartha Mukherjee from The New Yorker
Lessons on cancer and quagga mussels, odd and fascinating as you’d expect.
“The Island of the Wolves” by Kim Todd from OrionInadvertently, I had stumbled across what has been called the Harvard low of animal behavior, which is related to Murphy’s law: “You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer , 2018
Wolves and researchers at Isle Royale National Park— “But now, it appears the stories have been misinterpreted.”
Credit: Caninest/CC BY 2.0
www.pri.org
“Firestorm” by Douglas Fox from High Country News
The Bald and Eiler fires in Northern California were only 10 miles apart, but they traveled in opposite directions, different than what could be predicted based on just the wind. (Ryan Albaugh)
Efforts to understand and more importantly predict extreme wildfires. Firefighters lives depend on better information, and the occurrence is on the increase.
There’s also a bit about the test sites used to create firestorms. Disturbing, but hard to look away. I have to wonder if the curtains and cribs authenticity made a difference.
A model German apartment building goes up in flames during a test of the M-69 incendiary bomb in the 1940s at Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah. (Standard Oil Development Company)
“Tragedy of the Common” by J.B. Mackinnon fromPacific Standard
“The authors of one recent study found that the rate of population loss among terrestrial vertebrates is extremely high, even in “species of low concern.” They wrote that “beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations” and used the term “biological annihilation” to describe the magnitude of the crisis. Remarkably, they characterized the wave of local extirpations as a “much more serious and rapid” decline than mass extinctions.
Mackinnon is aware that most people aren’t that interested in the decline of whatever colored rump bug or bird. “I can sense the collective human shrug…. Widespread, abundant, adaptable—and damned. Why does it matter what happens to common species? Because we happen to be one of them.”
“The Irreversible Momentum of Clean Energy” by Barack Obama from Science
Keep hope alive with facts and figures. It felt like reading one of his speeches. I could hear his voice as I read.
Predating in point of view:Recently it’s been possible to see both sides leaning in a little closer to hear the optimistic arguments of the technocrats. Some sleight of hand has occurred by which we begin to move from talk of combating and reversing to discussion of carbon capture and storage, and higher sea walls, and generators on the roof, and battening down the hatches. Both sides meet in failure. They say to each other: “Yes, perhaps we should have had the argument differently, some time ago, but now it is too late, now we must work with what we have.” — Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays, 2018
“Wealthier People Produce More Carbon Pollution—Even the “Green” Ones by David Roberts from Vox
Total shocker. You don’t need to live in a McMansion to generate an impressive carbon-footprint. If every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice than you’re probably not going to recycle your way out of that hole.
Roberts is clear. He wholeheartedly approves of environmentally friendly living.” every second spent locomoting in some fashion other than a personal vehicle is a blessing to your physical and mental health.”
In theory, I agree but, wish for fewer traffic hazards.
“Dr. Space Junk Unearths the Cultural Landscape of the Cosmos” by Ceridwen Dovey from The New Yorker
Cable ties last longer than the chewed bones we used to chuck over our shoulders sitting around the fire.
“Of Mothers and Monkeys” by Caitlin Kuehn from
Reflections on work and her mother’s cancer therapy— I wish them all well.
“David Haskell Speaks for the Trees” by Paul Kvinta from Outside
While I’m inordinately pleased with the tree those nice young people from the UH conservation program gave me but, I don’t share David’s spiritual connection with trees. His girlfriend is on the same page so all is well.
“A Science of the Soul” by Joshua Rothman from The New Yorker
Sounds like Daniel Dennett has a great life. As for the rest, you’re on your own.
“The Detective of Northern Oddities” by Christopher Solomon from Outside
Burek (right) and assistant Rachael Rooney prepare an otter for necropsy at a U.S. Fish and Wildlife lab in Anchorage. (All activities conducted pursuant to National Marine Fisheries Service Permit No. 18786.) Joshua Corbett
You get a snapshot of a day in the life of wildlife pathologist in Alaska. While it’s not for the squeamish, her workday is fascinating. The warmer weather is a game changer.
“Female Scientists Report a Horrifying Culture of Sexual Assault” by Kayla Webley Adler fromMarie Claire
No surprises. “Same shit, another day.”
“A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Scott Pruitt’s Dysfunctional EPA” by Rachel Leven from Center for Public Integrity
More depressing but true facts.
“ Two Stars Slammed into Each Other and Solved Half of Astronomy’s Problems” by Rebecca Boyle from Five ThirtyEight
“The August 17 gravitational wave gave astronomers a glimpse at an entirely different universe.” Dubbed a “Rosetta Stone for astronomy,” the event seems to have raised a whole new slew of unanswered questions.
“The Starship or the Canoe” by Kenneth Brower from California
The Dysons / Illustration by PJ Loughran
A revisit with the brilliant Dysons, father, Freeman and son, George, forty years after The Starship and the Canoe. I like the story about a trip with George’s sister, Ester, for her standby ticket on a rocket.” It’s an irony. When we were kids, Freeman was building a spaceship, and I really wanted to go. I was 5 years old, and I thought they were building it there in San Diego. I imagined that the big, round building at General Atomic was the launch pad for the spaceship, and we were going to get in it and go. Then all these years later, it’s actually Esther. The story of my life! Everything I ever did was always outshadowed by Esther. So we end up going to Kazakhstan. Esther was the backup on the rocket flight. Every time they fly one of these tourists, they have a backup, in case you break your leg the week before the flight. She took all the training. Survival course, and so on. Even the standby seat costs $3 million.”
The missile base, it seemed to George, was caught in a time warp, stuck int Sputnik era. “They haven’t changed anything.” He said. “It worked in 1960, and that’s the way they still do it. The telephones are all dial phones. The whole launch site is run on coal-fired generators. The place looks like it was built by Soviet slave labor. Which it was.”
Charles Simony, the billionaire for whom Esther was understudy, and who had paid $35 million for his seat, did not break a leg, unfortunately. “He brought his beautiful young Swedish wife and all her family,” said George. “They were wearing mink coats out in the Kazakh desert. And Esther shows up with her motley family. They put us all up in the Sputnik Hotel. Everything was very choreographed. It was like a wedding. Russian Orthodox priests. One side of the family were aristocrats, and the other side were hillbillies.”
The rocket went up, with the three Dysons, the hillbillies, watching from the ground. George had Freeman had a conversation. The agreed that this was crazy.
“The real irony is that here I am with Freeman, 50 years after Project Orion, watching the American pay $35 million to go into very low Earth orbit on a Russian rocket. It’s just so depressing. None of those space dreams came true. Or, they totally didn’t come true in terms of manned space flight. They absolutely did come true in terms of the robot machines, which are sending back all these incredible pictures.”
“Astonish Me: Anticipating an Eclipse in the Age of Information” by Susannah Felts from Catapult
'Me and My Family View the Eclipse'
Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) by Steven Johnson from The New York Times Magazine
It’s an update on efforts to message extraterrestrial with arguments for and against announcing our location to potentially hostile and technologically superior species. It has careful consideration of the best way to communicate, possible reasons we still haven’t heard from anybody, and hopes that didn’t read too much into entertainment broadcast and the Hitler speeches released into space by incidental leakage.
David Brin brings up the possibility that we can produce as antimatter rocket and raises concerns about ET using even more powerful weapons. I’m sure why anyone is worried about hypothetical space aliens if people add antimatter to their arsenal. It sounds like a rate-limiting step.In that case, the adoption of a technologically advanced lifestyle might be effectively simultaneous with extinction. First you invent radio, then you invent technologies capable of destroying all life on your planet and shortly thereafter you push the button and your civilization goes dark
Maybe, it’s best not to expect too much.
Dean: It's on!
Hank: It's off!
Dean: It's on!
Hank: It's off!
Dean: It's on!
Hank: It's off!
Dean: It's on!
Hank: Off!
Dean: It's on!
Hank: It's off!
Dean: It's on!
Hank: Off!
Dean: It's on!
Dr. Venture: That's called 'blinking,' boys...
Hank: "Now it's just regular on."
From The Venture Bros., Careers in Science, Season One, Episode 2
Arabella (Araneus didematus) 1973 by Elena Passarello from The Normal School
Remember that little spider that had to learn how to spin a web without gravity.
Tiny Jumping Spiders Can See the Moon by Ed Young from The Atlantic
Spiders will chase a laser pointer and have double lens eyes that work like telescopes.
https://twitter.com/i/status/87184386...
When Your Child Is a Psychopath by Barbara Bradley Hagerty from The Atlantic
Terrifying, she's not talking about teenagers with layers of antisocial behavior and possibly substance abuse issues, but much younger children. There are behavioral treatments which offer some hope.
Exposure Therapy and the Fine Art of Scaring the Shit out of Yourself on Purpose by Eva Holland from Esquire
Better living with appropriate behavioral therapy
Not to make light of OCD, millions suffer from anxiety disorders and exposure with response prevention, also known as ERP, is the gold-standard treatment.
Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank by Kathryn Schulz from The New Yorker
A fun look at fantasy and belief.
-
A very interesting anthology which like most anthologies has essays that are hit and miss. These were mostly hits. Edited by Sam Kean, I thought it was a good mix of a variety of topics and tone. This was during the Trump years so there was an anti-science administration during this compilation. History remembers the March for Science protests ect. Kean could not avoid wading into political waters because anti-science was a huge part of the story of 2018. Depressingly, gender politics is manifested in the scientific community in the worst possible way. Kean's choices seem to reflect an attempt to prove the importance of science. This year anthology with multiple essays on cancer research as well as climate change, and a decidedly feminist take on 3-D printing.
This was definitely closer to 5 Stars than 3 Stars. Though there were quite a few that fell flat. Luckily there even more good essays here to compensate. Among my favorites were It'll Take an Army to Kill the Emperor and Cancer's Invasion Equation about cancer research that was going on in 2017. Two separate essays from entirely different scientific angle (one was gene therapy the other about drug research). Firestorm was an interesting look at how they read fires and the technology being developed to fight fires. Tragedy of the Common looks at how common animal and bird species are disappearing due to climate change. Greetings, E.T. (Please Don't Murder Us.) is my favorite. It was basically a discussion of how scientists are dealing with the prospect of first contact. Lots of paranoia in the scientific community. All in all, an educational and entertaining read. There will be more Science and Nature anthologies in my future.
4+ Stars
Read on kindle -
Twenty-eighteen was a tough year to put out a volume in this long-standing series. The articles were from 2017, when it had become apparent just how bad Donald Trump’s assault on intelligence, integrity, and science was going to be. Idiotic sycophants were put in change of Federal agencies with an agenda to either destroy them outright or turn them into appendages of the industries they were supposed to regulate. Remember Rick Perry, who couldn’t even name the agencies he wanted to eliminate, which included the Department of Energy?; he was put in charge of it. The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, was a longtime enemy, who had sued it fourteen times in his previous job. The head of the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, seemed intent on destroying public education. Welcome to Trump World.
The articles chosen for the 2018 book are all important and well written, but a grim mood seems to permeate the book. There is an article on just how bad things had become for the career employees at the EPA, whose opinions and expertise were ignored in the rush to accommodate industry. Another article recounts the horrific sexual abuse many female scientists endure in their jobs, and while there are indications that the situation may be changing, for too long their complaints were laughed off or ignored, on the grounds that boys will be boys.
There is such a wide range of of articles that no single theme emerges, so instead I am simply going to quote some of the selections which I found particularly interesting or insightful.
- grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe – in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are ... ‘visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and rationable.’ Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became ‘the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.’ The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest. (p. 79) John Lanchester, New Yorker, The Case Against Civilization
- Take England, for example which is small and critter-obsessed enough to count its wildlife nearly one by one. Population estimates for 58 species of land mammals in that country, ranging from the familiar to the obscure, total about 173 million animals. But just three species, the common shrew, rabbit, and mole – account for half of those individuals. All told, the most common 25 percent of English mammal species add up to 97 percent of all the individual animals. (p. 136) J.B. Mackinnon, Pacific Standard, Tragedy of the Common
- Of all the fish in the oceans, just 10 species account for almost a third of the global catch – Alaskan pollock, chub mackerel, Atlantic herring, yellowfin tuna, and Japanese anchovy among them. The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization classifies every one of these fish stocks as either ‘fully fished’ or ‘overfished.’ Similarly, the 10 most common tree species in any given nation will, on average, provide 76 percent of the wood and pulp production. In the United States, home to sprawling forests and more than a thousand native tree species, just three – douglas fir, lobolly pine, and western hemlock – account for one-quarter of the timber harvest. (p. 136) J.B. Mackinnon, Pacific Standard, Tragedy of the Common
- Sparrows and starlings ... move their calls into higher registers to communicate over the urban rumble. Most bird species can’t adapt like that. They lose their acoustic social networks and disappear from urban areas. But sparrows and starlings, along with pigeons, occupy 80 percent of the world’s cities. (p. 181) Paul Kvinta, Outside, David Haskell Speaks for the Trees.
- By 2012, the [freshwater mussel]Dreissena population in parts of southern Lake Michigan had reached a density of 10,000 per square meter. By one estimate, there were 950 trillion mussels in the lake, its bottom a crackling carpet of calcium. By 2015, the density was 15,000 per square meter – more mussels, by weight, than all of the fish in the lakes. (p. 86)
- As human-generated greenhouse gases continue to trap heat in the world’s oceans, air and ice at the rate of four Hiroshima bombs per second, and carbon dioxide reaches its greatest atmospheric concentration in 800,000 years, the highest latitudes are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. (p. 215) Christoper Solomon, Outside, The Detective of Northern Oddities
- while adult psychopaths constitute only a tiny fraction of the general population, studies suggest that they commit half of all violent crimes. Ignore the problem, says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, ‘and it could be argued we have blood on our hands.’ (p. 311) Barbara Bradley Hagerty, The Atlantic, When Your Child is a Psychopath
- Evidence mounts that we have passed our peak and a devolutionary downslide has begun. Consider the GOP. Just 150 years ago it was the party of Lincoln. (p. 265) Kenneth Brower, California, The Starship or the Canoe -
Oh hello, it’s Best American time again and I’ve started with my perennial favorite, Science and Nature. I like Kean’s books, do I wasn’t worried about his ability to find good articles for this anthology. But this anthology is such a great spread of science writing, with call-backs to other included pieces (whether intentional or not), and all so very relevant to the current world today. AND the pieces are organized by theme using slogans from the March for Science. A great way to kick off October reading.
-
Thanks to the
Reading Glasses Reader Challenge, I realized toward the end of the year that I still hadn't read a short story collection or anthology. This particular format is a pretty fun concept, and something new for me. In The Best American Science and Nature Writing series, an editor curates top reporting from the preceding year. In this case, the year was 2018 and the curator was Sam Kean, one of my favorite science writers. He starts out with an introduction highlighting the adverse effects of the political climate (Trump's election) on the sciences, and organizes the book's categories using fun and relevant slogans from the April 22, 2017 March for Science:
- Transformative Science: "We are not just resistors, we are transformers."
- Rethinking Established Science: "What do we want? Evidence-based science. When do we want it? After peer review."
- Environmental Science: "At the start of every disaster movie is a scientist being ignored."
- Profiles: "So bad, even the introverts are here."
- Political Science: "I'm not a mad scientist - I'm absolutely furious."
- Space Science: "It's not rocket science... (Actually, some of it is.)"
- Neuroscience and Psychology: "Stop inhibiting my action potential."
The 26 articles, written over the course of 2017, were divided among these categories, and Kean's task was to winnow down hundreds of potential entries to fill out each category, avoiding repetition of topic or style. It's a great mix, covering topics as far-flung as reinstating grasslands and woolly mammoths in Siberia, to reinventing the breast pump, to fighting cancer, to the physics of massive fires, to the threat of climate change, to space junk, to contacting alien planets, to approaches for children with psychopathic tendencies, and to my favorite... "
Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them", in which Kathryn Schulz ranks the plausibility of various fantastical creatures. All of these can be found online or in their respective publications, but I think I'd only read one previously. There were some excellent authors that I'd read before: Siddhartha Mukherjee, Barack Obama, Steven Johnson, and Ed Yong. Don't let that sampling mislead you, though: there's an even mix of male and female article contributors. 7 of the women represented have written books, and I've added a bunch to my want-to-read list on Goodreads. That's another benefit of reading this type of anthology: you find a bunch of new authors and books to add to the mix! -
Twenty-six stories here organized into seven sections plus the forward and introduction come together as a good science anthology.
Sam Kean, this year’s guest editor, winnowed over a hundred nominees, which meant two months of agony as he read some stories two or three times. He thanks the writers for making the job so difficult forcing him to make agonizing, therefor enjoyable, decisions about which ones to publish. The ones that did not make the cut fill a four-page list in the appendix.
Unlike previous editions, Kean, the guest editor, organized this year’s articles into sections, the title of each one comes from signs at last year’s March for Science.
I found a third of the pieces noteworthy:
FIVE STARS
Introduction, by Sam Kean, this year’s guest editor. “Those of us who pick up a science book probably did not feel good about the election two years ago,” writes Kean. Although the administration holds science in contempt, Kean writes that science will rise above and survive. The selections here split the difference between pure science and articles that bemoan the state of affairs.
David Haskell Speaks for the Trees, by Paul Kvinta, first published by Outside. The profile of a literary nature writer and of a pear tree in July at 86th and Broadway. “Trees change the weather in a city,” says David Haskell. This one cools the sidewalk twenty degrees from the adjacent unshaded pavement in Manhattan. Haskell studies trees, one individual at a time. The pear tree in New York grows on the sidewalk two stories above a subway. Responding to the reverberation of the train, the tree secured its anchor by fattening and stiffening its roots, hugging the earth tighter than its siblings in the forest. Trees slow rainwater by diverting it into the soil. New York City’s tree cover, along with sewer improvements, helped clean the East and Hudson rivers, resulting in more fish and cormorants. This article also reviews Haskell’s two most famous books. It took him two years to write The Song of The Trees published last year, focusing on a dozen trees around the world. Haskell documented tree songs that reveal the biological networks among tree connected to other plants and animals. He published The Forest Unseen six years ago, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, which led people to compare Haskel to Thoreau and Leopold. “He extracts an enormous amount of meaning from (a square meter of ground) by using incredibly precise poetic language,” wrote a Pulitzer judge. Haskell is a professor of biology and the environment. Haskell developed an interest in arboreal acoustics — wind rustling through trees, woodpeckers hammering bark, for example — and what that indicates about the ecosystem networks.
Female Students Report A Horrifying Culture of Sexual Assault, by Kayla Webley Adler, from Marie Claire. For the second year in a row, this anthology addresses sexual assault. Last year’s article documented some of the horror, anticipating the Me Too movement. This year we learn about Kate Clancy, a Phd at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, who presented results of science women who wrote anonymously about their experience. “We’re watching you now. We’re not going to let you pull that shit anymore,” Clancy told the audience who came to her presentation. This article reported that sexism also takes a quieter toll on women scientists in other ways. They receive less mentoring, receive fewer awards, speak at fewer conferences and receive less funding for their research. But thanks to people like Clancy, reform is on the way.
FOUR AND A HALF STARS
Wealthier People Produce More Carbon Pollution, Even the “Green” Ones, by David Roberts, from Vox. Rich people emit more carbon, even those who recycle and buy organic veggies, writes Roberts. Study after study finds that income serves as the primary determinant of a person’s actual ecological footprint. The variables that most predict carbon footprint: per capita living space, meat consumption, car use and vacation travel. To make a dent in her carbon footprint the average upper-middle class American would need to cut back on travel by rarely flying while favoring walking, biking and transit. She would give up meat and live in a small apartment in a dense urban area served by transit.
Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them, by Kathryn Schulz, from The New Yorker. Angels, giants, zombies, unicorns, dragons, leprechauns and other supernatural creatures meet science which rates the plausibility of each one. Seven out of ten Americans believe in angles, half believe in ghosts. Of the twenty figures in our culture, a couple of them perform practical chores, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Interesting.
FOUR STARS
Firestorm, by Douglas Fox, which first appeared in High Country News, explains the way a wildfire breathes and moves while telling why some blazes lash out in dangerous and unexpected ways. “For now, fire whirls are almost impossible to predict.” In addition to the destruction, the news reports often include the advancing science of these new firenadoes.
A Science of The Soul, by Joshua Rothman, from The New Yorker. A profile of David Dennet, a philosopher in his seventies who teaches at Tufts, explaining how a soulless world gave rise to soulful one. Dennet focuses on creation of the human mind by bringing related disciplines to bear, including neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology.
Two Stars Slammed into Each Other and Solved Half of Astronomy’s Problems. What Comes Next?, by Rebecca Boyle, from Five Thirty-Eight. Astronomy took a giant leap last year when two neutron stars collided. On that August day, astronomers learned the universe’s rate of expansion by comparing data from the light with that of gravitational waves. The collision took three weeks over a hundred million years ago. The reading of that event united the threads of astronomy.
When Your Child Is A Psychopath, by Barbara Bradley Haggerty, from The Atlantic. Haggerty visited the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Madison, which opened in the mid-nineties, responding to a national epidemic of youth violence. The Wisconsin legislature created the center to break the cycle of pathology, effective in many cases. The author brings a familiar voice to the article because she worked at NPR for nineteen years, where she continues to contribute.
Exposure Therapy and the Fine Art of Scaring the Shit Out of Yourself on Purpose, by Eva Holland, from Esquire. Exposure therapy combines imagining and relaxation. In the eighties, research on PTSD, an anxiety disorder, began to include exposure therapy, which meant gong to places that reminded victims of the trauma. Prolonged exposure therapy worked for eighty-percent of patients. Exposure therapy became the gold standard for treating anxiety disorders. Time magazine named the researchers among its most influential people. (I lived with PTSD after a criminal assault which resulted in traumatic brain injury. Wishing now that my therapy included exposure, which might have hastened aspects of the recovery.)
Foreword, by Tim Folger, the series editor. “Think of this anthology as a perfect antidote to quackery,” writes Folger. He points to a few articles in this year’s collection, including an article about Scott Pruitt, who resigned over the summer amid ethics violations as head of his dysfunctional EPA. Another essay describes how the wealthy among us are the least green. “Lifestyle changes may soothe our first-world conscience, but well-meaning individual actions cannot substitute for far-reaching national and international policies.” writes Folger. Meanwhile, Obama’s article here explains how our economy grew ten percent while energy consumption fell ten percent, refuting claims that reducing carbon emission will stifle growth.
Barack Obama and Siddhartha Mukherjee bring star power to their essays here, but their articles did not rise to the level of noteworthy for me.
Jaime Green takes over as the series editor with the next edition following Tim Folgers’ seventeen years. -
Collection of the best science articles of the year. A few stood out to me as really good:
“It’ll Take an Army to Kill the Emperor” - A really well-written rundown of all the latest (and fascinating) advancements in cancer-fighting.
“Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.)” - I had no idea that there was a very real debate about whether or not to try and make contact with possible life in space. The arguments for and against were very interesting.
“Arabella (Araneus diadematus) 1973” - The life of a former world-famous resident of Skylab.
“A Science of the Soul” - Scientists try to answer the question “Do we have a soul?” If so, how did we get it? If not, why do we think we do?
“When Your Child is a Psychopath” - Psychopaths can now be spotted by age 4, and behaviorists are trying new treatments to cure it.
Honorable Mention:
“Tiny Jumping Spiders Can See the Moon”
“The Detective of Northern Oddities”
“Female Scientists Report a Horrifying Culture of Sexual Assault”
“Two Stars Slammed Into Each Other and Solved Half of Astronomy’s Problems. What Comes Next?” -
As usual with collections of essays, some are strong or interesting, others not so much. A few that caught my attention:
An article about de-extinction of mammoths and other long-dead beasts. What I'd like back is the Carolina Parakeet, but unfortunately that was not dealt with in the article.
A couple of good essays about progress being made in fighting cancer. Maybe in another 50 years.....
One about how the establishment of civilization was driven by the need to find a way to levy taxes, and was in general really bad for its participants until quite recently, as compared to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle which has always appealed to my inner Neanderthal. The essay is an economic theory of the rise of agriculture so to speak; very believable and logical, and with a nice tie-in to another book I've read, Abundance Without Affluence, about the Bushmen in Namibia.
A fact-filled article by Barack Obama about the unstoppable rise of wind and solar power. Thanks Mr. President, it's nice to listen to a chief executive who understands actual facts, versus the alternative sort. And the news on alternative energy is good!
I did not read the one about Scott Pruitt's EPA, because current events are depressing enough.
"A Science of the Soul" surprised me by engaging me; normally I am bored stiff by philosophy. First off, Daniel Dennett is an interesting man, and secondly, I've been contemplating how the continuity of consciousness is important to any scheme (a la the TV show DEVS) to continue life in digital form.
Kenneth Brower's treatment of the Dysons, pere et fils, is interesting in a number of ways, not least in describing the nuclear-powered concept for interstellar travel that was actually taken seriously and funded in the conceptual stage by the US DoD in the 1960's. Nuclear-bomb-powered travel, to be clear. Yeah, I know.
"When Your Child is a Psychopath" was fascinating, in a horrible way. So, I guess "Dexter" was not that far-fetched after all. I read every word. -
All the essays in this book are well written, some superbly; all are interesting, some fascinating. The essays delve into a panoply of intriguing science/nature topic in ways accessible and engaging for lay readers.
Favorites of mine:
—a portrait of a scientist trying to bring mammoths back into existence in the Arctic (“Pleistocene Park”);
—an analysis of wildfires (“Firestorm”);
—a space anthropologist who studies at all the earth junk piling up in space and all the space junk piling up on Earth
— the pros and cons of trying to contact extraterrestrial life “Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us)”;
—an examination of psychopathic children and their families (“When Your Child Is a Psychopath”)
—a discussion of how the human brain can cogitate on nonexistent things, including ranking of 20 imaginary creatures in terms of the likelihood they could exist even though they don’t (“Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them”)
My only gripes about the book came when the essays turned overtly political. I don’t enjoy when people spew political opinions (no matter what side they take) during a conversation, nor do I like it when an author holds me captive with theirs. The “Foreword” and “Introduction” are particular annoying along these lines, the author of the latter even revealing that, when putting this anthology together, they considered an approach that would “ignore politics completely” but opted against that. I wish they had followed that instinct. I would have given it five stars if they had. -
I *finally* finished this book! Each time I liked an article, I went off into a rabbit hole of looking up the author and reading references of papers and books listed. Very thoughtfully curated, it’s hard to pick favourites.
Environmental science section stood out for me with various stories of conservation and climate change. I especially loved the mathematical exploration of ecological systems - tracking wildlife population with differential equations. The more I read of evolutionary biology and ecological adaptation, the more fascinated I am with doing field work in this area. The policy articles here were a vacillation between hope and despair as Barack Obama and Scott Pruitt, both made appearances.
The astrophysics & space comms section was utterly fascinating. The story of Arecibo and METI, our efforts to send a beacon out into space, hoping for extra terrestrial intelligent life to pick up on our signal, was riveting. The story of Arabella, the spider that was sent to outer space to weave her web in microgravity was sheer poetry. I loved the Dyson father-son narrative of two brilliant men of science, watch the space tourist Charles Simonyi go up, thanks to the work of their daughter and sister, Ester, pragmatic and brilliant in her own right.
The transformative science articles were entertaining. The story on children whose mental wiring pushes them towards being psychopaths and the facility where they are “treated” was chilling. I was deeply disturbed and heartbroken at the plight of these children and their parents. Siddharth Mukherjee uses his usual lyrical style to bring us the latest in immunotherapies for cancer. Made me wonder how much of the holistic medicine trope for cancer was actually true! Oh, the firestorm article was awesome! It tracks how fires form & spread with a great analysis of the pyrophysics underneath it. Wildfires, nuclear bombs, urban fires - everything is covered 🔥
Sam Kean has done a great job of selecting articles. It’s gonna be Sy Montgomery next year! Meanwhile, it’ll probably take me all of 2018 to finish the books I marked out as “follow up reading” from this book! -
I love Sam Kean--I've probably shoved The Disappearing Spoon in front of more people than anyone else ever. And I was excited to hear that he was the editor this year--the series has faltered in recent years by selecting 'it girl' editors who really wanted to prove to the readership how smart and edgy they were, rather than selecting a broad range of powerful writing. I'd sworn off the series after three solid years of clonkers, but when I heard Kean was the editor, I slammed my order into Amazon.
And for a large part, my hope was not misplaced. He breaks the collection down into various themes, each, with the typical Kean cleverness, titled after signs from the March for Science. And there's a wonderful breadth of science represented here--astronomy to cancer research and everything in between. There are essays that will make you feel smarter (one about how the 'greenest' people often have the largest carbon footprint, which really made me rethink some choices I make!), and feel powerful emotions (one about Arabella, the spider in space who spun crazy webs--I hate spiders so the fact I teared up at this essay says something about the quality of writing Kean has an eye and ear for!), things that make you think (one about whether we could or should communicate with aliens was a real seesaw of thoughts!).
That said, there were a few losers in this collection of otherwise winners--and by losers, I mean stuff that was a waste of time, that made me feel like the pages could have been given to much better essays, but were included for purposes of Woke Cred. Yeah, I'm talking about the Obama essay. First off, literally, has anyone NOT read this essay already? When it came out, my friends could not pass the essay around fast enough. I look to these collections to sort through and find the hidden gems people who don't read science all the time don't have time to find themselves. It shouldn't be 'here's the popular stuff literally EVERYONE has already read'. Second, it's just...well, it recalls to me a sour note in Kean's introduction.
See, Kean, despite being one of the smartest and wittiest guys I can think of, falls for the same stupid trap as almost everyone on the political Left--that of thinking that anyone who disagrees with you is a) evil and b) impenetrably stupid. Worse than that, he justifies the response to anyone politically not Left being one of anger. "We're all angry" he says, at one point. And I, a committed 'a plague on both your houses' libertarian, was like...well...no? I'm not *happy*, but I'm not angry at politics. So having him double whammy (we're all angry at those ignorant hateful republicans) is distressing, because if nothing else, a collection of science essays should not 'preach to the choir' and overtly alienate the other side. If, as he posits, right wing people are all morons, should he want to bring them into the fold, get them *into* science by reading a collection exactly like this one. It shouldn't serve as a further tool of division. You can do better, Kean. -
This is a much better collection of articles than the 2017 edition that I just read! 26 total and I gave out 7 "check marks", 2 "YES!", 1 "Good!" and 1 "crying face" for the depressing laboratory animals.
The YES! votes went to The Case Against Civilization, *nods* and Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them. There were also a couple of articles about how women are abused and discriminated against in the sciences, and it's good to see some of that coming to the light so we can fix it! -
A splendid & varied selection
-
Excellent as always. Informative, thoughtful. Promising advances in cancer treatment and understanding fire behavior; valuable perspectives on animal research, consciousness, and climate change; disconcerting exposés of sexual assault in the scientific community and early detection of psychopathy in children.
-
Some good and some bad, as to be expected from a collection of shorter pieces.
-
I'm glad this issue was not full of doom and gloom on climate change. My personal favorites were: The Detective of Northern Oddities (always love stuff about the arctic), Female Scientists, and Arabella. But most of them were worth reading.
-
In 2013 David Haskell published a book, The Forest Unseen. He selected a square meter of forest floor and described his daily observations in the course of an year. And that is the entire book.
"I started reading and thought 'Oh, no, another concept-driven book", says one of the Pulitzer judges only to discover a Yoda-like connection to nature with its own characters and drama.
Haskell maintained a poetry blog for a time, putting out a haiku every day, he had a meditation practice. A new approach occurred to him -- to combines science, mediation, and creative writing.
So for example, when he writes about lichen in the book. He explains how lichens interact with water, then he goes into history of how this knowledge was accrued and then cites Taoist philosophy that employ lichens adaptation strategies.
In the story by Paul Kvinta, he and David Haskell visit a tree at the corner of 86th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. The tree is utterly average. Haskell is not offended by the assessment, in fact that's why he includes it in one of his books. And he invites Kvinta to spend a couple of days visiting and observing the tree and the world around it -- sitting in front of a Banana Republic store, above a rumbling 86th street subway station.
Kvinta wanted to see if what Haskell did by writing for a patch of forest land can be paralleled in observations gleaned in a tree at a city street corner.
The story is structured as small diary-type posts with a day of the week and time of the day -- then the "invisible appears, the small grows large".
Dogs stop by the tree, the tree is a shelter for pedestrians who seek a spot for a stop outside 2 rivers of flowing humans exiting the subway and those going the other way on the sidewalk. The tree is a specie from China and deploys formidable chemical defenses against local herbivores (insects, such as caterpillars). A page on Facebook pronounced the tree as evil.
In response of incessant reverberations from the subway the tree has fattened and stiffened its roots, more so than in a forest.
A flock of sparrows a swooping down from the upper branches of the tree to pick up crumbs. Hankell observes that the sparrows can be heard above the low-frequency dint of a passing garbage truck, they have moved their calls at higher frequencies to be able to communicate among the urban cacophony. Most other bird species can't adapt like that.
The story continues delving into observations like that.
It was picked up from the magazine Outside and this specifically demonstrates the two beneficial qualities of the annual collections "The Best of American Science" -- it reproduces some of the distinctive postings in the major magazines -- The New Yorker, etc -- but also shows the dimension of the field of science-oriented publishing out there. -
Eclectic anthology of science and nature writing handpicked from across the journalistic spectrum- from The Atlantic and Vox to Marie Claire, with topics ranging from the melting of the Arctic permafrost and the quest to communicate with aliens to raising budding psychopaths and reinventing breast pumps.
As with any anthology, it gives the reader liberty to love, hate and yawn at different pieces, consequently challenging them to struggle with rating it fairly. Personally, I enjoyed reading most writings it featured, specifically in the sections on Environmental Science, Profiles, Neuroscience and Psychology. I did not particularly care for the Space Science ones as much. My absolute favourite was "Of Mothers and Monkeys" by Caitlin Kuehn.
I liked that most of the articles were short, assuredly contemporary, and amassed a range I don't conjure to read up on my own. It felt like a really wise and well-read friend had designed me a gift basket of foraged internet gems for my personal perusal. I like the concept of such collections, and will definitely read more in the future! -
Amazon alerted me that this book was about to leave kindle unlimited, so I snapped it up since I have enjoyed others in the series. I suggest you do the same.
My first reaction was disappointment and cost the book one star. These days a big reason I like science is to get a break from social.issues and politics, but both Tim Folger and Sam Kean had to delve deep into it in the introductions. I agree with them, but give it a rest. A few of the articles reflect this as well.
As soon as I started reading, though, I got the pleasure I was hoping for in a wonderful story of a huge, imaginative project to address climate change. It alone makes the book worthwhile. All collections like this have some stories the reader will like better than others, but I think this book has enough to please just about anyone who is interested in science. -
As per usual, this is an excellent collection of articles and features written about scientific subjects and figures from the previous year. My only complaint would be the inclusion of an article by Barack Obama on the economic potential of renewable energy industries, which pretty much entirely ignored the moral and existential need for said industries to curtail ecological collapse. It felt gross and pathetic to have that article - which essentially just viewed the topic in cold, status-quo-friendly economic terms - wedged into the center of an otherwise captivating and enlightening collection.
-
This is an anthology of previously published science/nature articles. All were first published in 2017. Some I had read before, but most I had missed. What they all have in common, aside from touching on science in some way, is good writing. None of these articles are so technical that the average reader won't be able to understand them. Some of these articles are about those who are making or have made science news. This is the best of good science writing - making the difficult understandable, relatable, and even interesting. Like any anthology, not something you sit down and read cover to cover, but slip in a good read between other things. Enjoy!
-
I have read this book every year for quite a few years. It is updated annually and consists of a curated list of magazine articles focused on nature and science. Altho in cab obviously read the articles in the magazines, I find the curating to really add value. I always find articles that deliver delightfully unexpected information e.g. this year ... a guy is trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth in Siberia (along with a recreated habitat), the neolithic revolitionwas a disaster for humans, 8/17/17 was the most prolific day of dats in a century for astrophysics, etc.
-
Sometimes I really don't know how these books end up on my Kindle. But I decided to read this before it became completely irrelevant. It was actually amazingly interesting with essays on everything from a man trying to recreate the Pleistocene era in Russia, to cancer treatments, to possible outcomes of communicating with aliens, to trying to rehabilitate psychopaths, to how to categorize mythological creatures. All interesting and entertaining (true, the political essays didn't hold up as well) and I learned a lot as well.
