Science Friday - SciFri Reads ‘The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023’

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

The editors of this year’s The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology—and special guest journalists and writers—took to the virtual stage to reflect on their favorite stories from 2023, the biggest news from this year in science, and the future of scientific discovery and journalism.The guests:Carl Zimmer is the author of many science books, including Life’s Edge: The Search of What it Means to Be Alive and She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. He’s also the guest editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023, and is based in New York, NY.Jaime Green is a science writer and author of The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos. She is also the series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023, and is based in Connecticut.Marion Renault is a health and science writer based in Grenoble, France. Their essay, A French Village’s Radical Vision of a Good Life with Alzheimer’s, is featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023.Maryn McKenna is a senior fellow at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health, a former senior writer at Wired, and the author of many books, including Big Chicken, Superbug, and Beating Back the Devil. Her essay, The Provincetown Breakthrough, is featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023This event was a part of the SciFri Book Club read for December 2023. Watch the live zoom event on Youtube.Find out more about our book club on our main page. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

If you're trying to collect great science Friday, how do you choose what's the best? It wasn't like we were putting these stories in some 100 meter dash and timing them or something like that. This was just representing what in 2023 people are doing. It's Thursday, December 28th, but according to my notes, it's Science Friday. I'm Charles Burgquist. The sci-fri book club reads some great books, but this conversation gets a bit meta. In a recent live stream, experiences manager Diana Plasker spoke with people involved with the anthology, the Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2023.

They taught craft, what makes for great writing, and how you strike the right balance between science detail and keeping a reader engaged. Here's Diana Plasker. We are here to talk about our SciFRI Book Club monthly book pick, which this month for December is, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2003, which is edited by Carl Zimmer and Jamie Green. I'm really excited to have both of the editors here today, as well as two of the contributors that were featured in this essay collection. Please, without further ado, welcome. We've got Carl Zimmer, a columnist for the New York Times and the author of many science books,

including Life's Edge, The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, and she has her mother's laugh. He's also the guest editor of the Best American Science in Nature writing in 2023, and he's based in Connecticut. Jamie Green is a science writer and author of The Possibility of Life, Science, Imagination, and our quest for kinship in the cosmos, which was also our book club pick for earlier this year. So you can read that book. It's great. She also serves as the series editor for the Best American Science and Nature writing this year and in years past, also based in Connecticut. Mary and Renaud is a health and science writer based in Grenoble, France. Their essay of French Villages' radical vision of a good life with Alzheimer's is featured in this year's series.

And last but not least, Marin McKenna is a senior writer at Wired Senior Fellow at Emery University's Center for the Study of Human Health and the author of many books, including Big Chicken, Superbug, and Beating Back the Devil. Her featured story, the Provincetown Breakthrough is also featured in this year's collection. Thank you all so much for being here. I'm so excited. Thanks for having us. Let's just start at the top. Carl, tell us a little bit about what it is like to be the guest editor for this selection. You talk a little bit in your introduction about the experience of doing that after many years of using this as part of your personal and professional life. So tell us a little bit about what that's like. Well, yeah, I teach a writing class at Yale where over a decade where that year's best of science and nature writing is one of the things that I assign.

And it's always guaranteed to give me a really great range of stories to show students all the different ways that you can. write about science and nature, different kinds of approaches, fresh approaches to very familiar topics or topics that no one ever thought to write about. And so it really felt like I could pay back by doing the work this year. So I was really glad to have the opportunity. Of course, it was very daunting because there's just so much to read. I mean, there's so many people are just cranking out stuff that is really good and really addressing a lot of the most urgent issues that we face. But Jamie was able to help me, guide me through this.

She has a lot more experience than I do with this series. So she had already been doing a ton of reading by the time the publisher reached out to me. So she showed me stuff that she had been reading. I kind of gathered up things that I had been reading. and discussed them, started looking for newer things. And yeah, and then, you know, this wasn't, you know, I wouldn't say that this is like, you know, it wasn't like we were putting these stories in some 100 meter dash

with a, you know, and a timing them or something like that. This was, I was creating, really creating, you know, the kind of book that I would want to teach from this year, just representing what in 2023 people are doing. And they are writing about, you know, there are certain things that are front and center, like recovering from the pandemic. And also, I guess, you know, another big theme of the book is, you know, the tipping points that we're pushing the planet past, whether it's climate change or melting glaciers or other

environmental assaults. And, but, you know, there's still room for surprises and for things that you might not think that anyone would write about, and yet they write about really well. Did you find that, or do you think that assigning this book this year will feel different having been the series editor for this year? Not really, no. It's interesting that when I look back at other editions, you know, there is that sort of, I think we're, you know, all the editors have been trying, you know, the chance, you know,

The challenge has been that science writing, nature writing, is inherently a very broad area. And so it's, you know, we're trying to like get out to the edges of the map, you know, because people just write about so many different things, whether it's cows or caves or Alzheimer's disease or being nearsighted. Like, there's just a lot of different things that can be covered. Jamie, as series editor, what is it like working with the guest editors each year? Does it, is it a totally different experience? Like, how do you guide the guest editors and sort of help them with your experience? Yeah, it is, it is different every year because, so basically, as Carl mentioned, like, part of my job is to, at the end of the year, send the guest editor a big,

list of pieces that I've read this year that I think are viable candidates. And then what happens after that is always different. You know, sometimes there's discussion in back and forth. Sometimes three months later, I get a table of contents and it's all pieces that were from my spreadsheet or almost none, no pieces that were from my spreadsheet. Sometimes we're sort of going back and forth and they're like, oh, I feel like I want to have a piece on this. You know, do you know who's writing should I look at, like trying to fill the gaps. Because some guest editors just are like, I want the 20 to 25 best pieces this year. Others are looking for sort of themes or developments or sort of like, you know,

gestures that they think were important from there. I mean, I also do that. I remember the year that the big gravitational wave discovery was made, you know, saying like, I want to see if I can find anything from there that fits. you know, when there's like a big science story, obviously COVID has been a big one over the last few years. But it was also really weird in the 2020 edition that those were all pieces from 2019. It was this very like creepy time capsule of like, as I sort of talk about in my forward of like before capital B. Did you find that this year, it seems like both of you sort of in your in your forwards and introductions reacted to things.

this like this is sort of a different edition in some ways. You could kind of, there was a sense of having a good amount of stories about COVID and some stories that were not and it felt right to be able to present a collection. Did you go into that this year sort of knowing that that would be or believing that that would be the case? Or were you surprised by how like sort of the stack of different stories? Well, I mean, you know, as a journalist, Actually, I remember, I don't know if Marin remembers, but I remember emailing her in early 2020

and we're both there like, well, here we go. Because we both write a lot about diseases. And it's like, here comes a big disease that we kind of knew was coming. And, you know, I'd love to hear Marin talk about her experience. My experience was basically I just wrote about, I felt like I'm writing about one kind of virus for two or three years or something. And just sometimes writing several stories a week. Like we were at the New York Times,

like the science section suddenly was like, you know, just like the breaking news section. And we were working with, you know, the political desk and the business desk and having all sorts of collaborations across the newspaper that were really remarkable and just going crazy. working as hard as we could on that.

And then, you know, there came a point where, you know, I was, things were kind of slowing down a little bit. And, you know, I don't remember what the first one was, but there came a point where I said to my editor, like, I think I might want to write a story not about COVID, you know, I don't know, Neanderthals or something like that. But I just sort of felt, I mean, you know, the pandemic was still happening. But I was like, maybe.

Like, could I mean, because, We were just watching all this science pass us by. Like, you know, just so much science was happening, even in infectious diseases, but we could only write about COVID. So, yeah, so I would say that, you know, the stories that were coming out in 2022 were kind of a, they were in that sort of in-between stage as, you know,

we're not, I'm still writing about COVID and other people are. but there's time for other things. And those things are important too. Like, you know, our planet's warmer than it's ever been. Like, we can't stop writing about that. So, yeah, so we're in this sort of intermediate stage. And I think the book captures that. Yeah, I think so too.

We've got some great questions already from our audience. I'm going to get the those in a few minutes. But, Marian, I wanted to talk with you a little bit about your essay that was featured, again, titled A French Village's Radical Vision of a Good Life with Alzheimer's. It's a very first person personal story that you tell. Did you go into writing this essay knowing that that would be the case? Or did that sort of slowly unfold and you realize the only way to tell the story is to include my perspective and my family's perspective in this?

I, from the very beginning, always envisioned this being in first person. And there was a number of things that made it so that it just felt like the only way to do it, even though typically I don't particularly like writing in first person. It's not something that I do a ton of, or I try not to do a ton of. But I felt like because my interest, even in the village itself, was born out of the relationship that I had with my grandma, the questions that I was confronting about how I, how my family, how these society treat people with dementia,

it partially just didn't feel honest in a way to not include that in the piece. I was sort of wanting to report it so that I could professionally develop these questions that I developed through personal experience. The part of it just felt honest and also just like I don't think

I could have been able to write it from a sort of detached third person, curious journalist with, you know, just poking around, asking questions. And then I also felt like what the piece was meant to do or what we wanted to do with the piece was talk about and really address the stigma around dementia,

and it didn't feel right to not explicitly implicate myself in that stigma because it is part of how I talk to my grandma. It is how my family talks about my grandma. It's about how I think of myself and the potential for me to have Alzheimer's because I do have two grandparents who had it. And so it felt not only true, but also a way to face this sort of ugliness of what that stigma is about, which can really be boiled down to like we generally, it's generally acceptable to say that someone in the late stages of dementia who doesn't know where they are, who doesn't know who I am or who they are, that they don't deserve certain rights and dignities. and they don't deserve certain things like having a home and not just housing or being treated as someone who is capable of autonomy, capable of freedom.

And I felt like by writing it in the first person, I could reach a hand out to the audience, not castigate, but sort of invite them to join me where I was in my processing of this subject as a human. Yeah. And I hope for me, it made me think differently about the people in my life who have experienced Alzheimer's or the people in my life who have loved ones who they've had to, you know, care for or, you know, who have had Alzheimer's and think about those times differently or invite them to read this essay to think differently about their, you know, family's experience. So, Jamie, I'd love to ask you, too, about what was it about this essay that helped make it? to the collection for you. I mean, it was, you know, I'm seeing in the chat somewhat, I'm gonna, it answers this question too.

How do you define the best? What is the defining criteria? And I will be honest that when I am reading for the anthology, I am not thinking about criteria at all. I am just thinking about the pieces that move me, that engage me. Like I'm reading hundreds of pieces, sometimes all crammed into the month of December,

And so I'm going fast. And these are the pieces that just like make me want to keep reading that feel important, that feel like I'm learning something. I, the opposite of Marion, I'm very predisposed to first person writing and essay writing. And so whenever there's a piece that does something interesting or unexpected with the form of the science magazine feature, I think I'm always a little extra interested. I love those features too. There are always plenty in the anthology, but I'm like, oh, this is different. And you can, I think maybe even feel that small danger and excitement of a writer

who is not usually being first person vulnerable, being first person vulnerable. And then it's also just very interesting science and so like humanely powerful. And yeah, you know, I have. have grandparents too, or I suppose at this point had past tense. And so it just, you know, there's so much emotional connection and scientific interest. And I just, yeah, it's the pieces that just get you that way. And that was one of them. Yeah.

This is one of those ones that also made the rounds in Science Friday's Slack. So we all were reading it around the time. So it definitely stood out to us as well. So I wasn't surprised to see it in the collection. I would just add that, you know, when I'm teaching, I find that students, a lot of students would like to just insert themselves into their stories. And I just say, like, you know, do you need to be there? You know, just you being you, it's not, you know, that's no offense, but it's not,

you may not be as interesting because the people you're writing about, at least in this context. Like, you know, I did this or I sat down in a desk. Like, I don't care. What makes me care? Well, it makes me care like if you have to be there in the story. So Marion has to be in her in that story.

Like, just I can't imagine her not being in it. So there are some pieces in this anthology that are first person, not just Marians. And you can just take a look and say like, okay, why did that report? or decide they needed to put that big first person in there. And why was it that people left themselves out of other ones? And that's a good way to just to kind of get to appreciate the decisions that science writers make.

Yeah, absolutely. Marin, I also want to talk a little bit about your essay, Provincetown Breakthrough. I when I started reading this essay again I had a little bit of trepidation because I was like okay I'm getting into one of the COVID stories that we're going to be telling and I and I got to the end and I'll admit that I welled up a little bit because it was just such a like a hopeful story about what's possible if we come together in community around these these difficult times and if we choose to create systems that can help in sort of these like, you know, catastrophic moments. I also had forgotten that this happened.

And so like I feel like a lot of like a lot of people, these essays are a reminder of some of the moments that were maybe only two years ago that we're sort of reflecting back on that since have felt like ancient history or that we're like, oh yeah, I kind of didn't remember that. I want to ask you a little bit about what it was like to write this essay. In addition to sort of like you had mentioned in our pre-interview that these stories are, you know, work of collectiveness, of like the story that you told about this outbreak that happened in Provincetown and the community that came together to sort of like take care of each other. Science writing is also a collective effort that there are people beyond the byline that make these things happen.

And so I just want to give you a little space to talk about the story and people who help make it happen. Okay. I'll try to keep all of those in mind. I know that was a lot. I'm so sorry. It's a lot of a pre-brief. But so first, thank you for having me. And thank you Carl and Jamie for selecting me.

So Carl, in his description of how he approached reviewing stories for this edition, really teed this up for me nicely. because this story was published 18 months ago, the middle of 2022, when that door was starting to open, both as a profession of science writers and also broadly as a culture, we were really starting to turn away from COVID and actively not want to hear about it anymore.

And the moment it describes, which is just about a year before that, is the moment when everything started to go wrong. So just to remind you a bit of the history, you know, COVID arrives somewhere around the turn of 2019 to 2020, maybe a bit a month or so. Before that, in Asia, it pretty much gets to the United States in March of 2020 and everything goes to hell. We get the vaccines in the middle of December 2020, an extraordinary effort. There has never been a vaccine that came to market. that fast. And by the early summer of 2021, people were starting to feel like we were going to come out of

it. Large numbers of people had been vaccinated just before the episode that's described in this story, both the CDC and then the White House had told people that they could take their masks off. People were starting to come out into public again. That's what was happening in Provincetown, which is sort of the capital for most of the country, or at least for the East Coast. of LGBTQ America. People were coming back to all the big street festivals and parties and clubs, so forth, that had existed before the pandemic

and then had been chilled for a couple of years. And then people started to get sick. And they got sick because the new variant, the Delta variant, was arriving. And that had not been predicted and the vaccine was not tuned up to prevent it. So first, that showed us that the vaccines were not going to be perfect

and that we were going to be in a race to always keep up with this virus. But also public health said, you know, it would be a good idea to start putting masks back on. And that's really the start of the mask wars, of the attacks on public health, of the attacks on school boards that have morphed into sore more general attacks on schools. I really think that the all the so many, not all, but so many of the negative things that we remember about the COVID, experience, which people think is over, it's not over, stem from that summer. And what was extraordinary to me, looking at that moment and hearing about how the mostly men who were in Provincetown in those couple of weeks decided to organize both themselves who were in Provincetown and their extended networks to get tested, to alert each other, to alert the rest of the country,

to engage with public health, proactively, to reach out and say, we got tested, we've done our own epidemiology, we can help you with this. They were voluntarily taking on themselves the kind of stigma that for the first six months of 2021 had largely been directed at the Asian community as having somehow imported COVID. Now they were almost inviting people by taking responsibility for the for pushing back against the virus, they were laying themselves open to being stigmatized as the people who brought Delta to the United States.

So when we started thinking, to transition to the second part of your question, when we started thinking about doing this story and the story really originates with my then-features editor, Adam Rogers, who'd been at Wired for a long time, he's now an insider. And then Adam very kindly passed a story

and to Anthony Lidgate, who was the features editor, who took, it forward from there under the ages of Gideon Litchfield, who was at the time the first queer editor-in-chief of Wired and really blessed this story. What we wanted to do was, oh, start watching this episode almost from the start, was to debunk that stigma and that that sense of responsibility being pinned on the gay and queer community and say, no, you have got this backwards. It's not that they caused this, it's that they prevented this. They prevented it from getting worse. So in addition

to being a debunk, it's kind of a love letter for me to a community that chose to do the right thing, knowing that they were going to suffer in the public sphere from doing that. And we had to wait some months to actually conclude the story, the last section of the story, which is about scientists at the Brod Institute, tracking down the genetics of the virus and proving that even though Delta overwhelmed the country and Omicron after it, the particular strain of Provincetown actually vanishes, and it vanishes because of the work that the gay and queer networks did. We had to wait for that last part of the story, which arrives in the spring of 2022 to tell the whole thing. But by the end, what we had, I think, was something that set the record

straight and gave people praise for things that they were being blamed for. And that felt really good. Yeah, it felt really good to read as well. Even if in the back of my mind, I was like, I wish like this story could like completely supersede the story that we had been told. But that is, that is what good science writing does, right? It tries its best. And it, when there's a story to sort of retell in the future, we try our best too. And so I just have to say thank you for saying that you weld up at the end and particularly at the last line. So I was an English major and French major. And the last line is a free adaptation of a line from Camus, the Plague, in which he says,

the main character says there are plagues, I'll do it in English because that's how it is in my story. There are plagues and victims in the world and we all of us can decide at any moment not to be on the side of the plagues.

I saw everyone reach for their copy to read it along and I just want to say it is amazing the things that science and arts can do together. That is a perfect example of how if you think you know who's plays and that won't possibly come into a work that you have in the science field, think again, because Marin just proved you wrong. Thank you so much. We've got some great questions from the chat, and so I'm going to sort of delve into them right now. One from Roberta, which reads, how do you decide how much scientific detail to put in, to still be informative to your essays, but not lose your reader in the weeds. I'm going to have to actually sort of like I know Carl and Jamie you don't have essays of course featured in the series but

you are science writers I'd love to hear your perspective of this too but um uh Jamie I'll start with you what do you how do you sort of like bridge this gap this is a calibration that often happens in conjunction with my editor um you know I do my best I I but I also and I have a lot of trouble especially when I'm writing about a topic that I've been writing about for a while or have been studying for a while or I'm interested in. I mean, studying as a lay person. I do not have a PhD. I often have trouble maintaining a sense of what a random reader already knows. You know, like when I'm writing about exoplanets, it's like, does the general reader know that we have found planets around other stars? Does the general reader know that we have not found life on any of them? Like, I don't know.

And so working with an editor, and I'm very lucky that the last few editors I've worked with on science pieces were not specialists in my zone of science. So there's often them asking for more explanation. So it's less for me about getting two in the weeds and more realizing when am I in the weeds and when do I need to show the reader of the path deep into the weeds. whatever deep in the weeds is usually what's very interesting to me. So it's more about how do we get them into the weeds so that when they are there to really overextend the metaphor, they don't feel lost and disoriented because I think if we stay outside of the weeds, then we're not going to get, it's not as interesting, it's not as exciting.

My favorite science writing by other writers is the stuff that gets us really deep in the weeds and feels good while we're going there. I love an extended metaphor. I'm here for it. I guess I would add that like for me, I have to remind myself the weeds are not actually the destination. Like we're not actually trying, you know, it's not like, oh, we're going to get into the weeds.

It's like, no, we're actually in the weeds for a reason. We're actually going somewhere else. And yeah, editors really can help. My current editor at the Times, Virginia Hughes, she will sometimes be like, do I really need to know this? And I'll look at a paragraph and be like, no, in fact, you don't. Like there's like, I can get through this much faster and there's nothing lost by just leaving out this like particularly convoluted piece of statistics. Like I know how that works and I know that these conclusions are sound because of that. But I don't need to walk people through.

like we're not we're writing stories and articles and essays we're not writing scientific papers so we need to sort of keep that stuff to a minimum but but as jamie says like you know they're you know you want to learn how these things are done you know how you know when maryon is showing how epidemiology is carried out like how does that work um and you learn when you read her piece amazing um marian what do you think how do you sort of bridge this sort of find balance here? I think there's some reporting that's for the reporter ultimately, and then there's the reporting that's actually for the end of the piece. And when I was an undergrad, one of my first journalism classes are, our professors big on, like, report this much, like say this much. And so

I try to sort of, as the, usually as a draft is going through edits, because I agree with everyone so far that it's especially helpful when you finally have a second person in the room. on the page, you have to look at everything you put in and explain why that's there or understand why it's there. And oftentimes, I find that if there's a bunch of details all cluster together and the editor points to it, usually all of that can just be one really good sentence. And it doesn't make any of the details that get pruned away less important. But there's sort of, you need to be bloated for, at least I feel like I need to be bloated first. Like I need to be sort of like the a wet stopping sponge and then after the editing like everything becomes more crystalline

everything becomes more precise because over time you just you see and you hear what the person doesn't need to know I think that's kind of what everyone's describing like you you sort of when something wiggles in the draft it's wiggling for a reason and you and you sort of know to pay attention and fix it so I I try to get completely imbibed and then trust that the edit process will turn that into what it needs to be, which will inevitably mean most of it is not going to be on the page. I love all the metaphors so far. We've got wiggling words.

We've got weeds. We've got sopping wet sponges. I'm here for it. Marin, do you have anything else you want to add? Well, I really enjoyed what Carl was saying because, like Carl, I teach science writing to undergraduates. And my undergraduates are primarily people who are in science and health majors. I think Carls are too. And this is a ferocious battle for them. And it has reminded me about sort of the battle that I take for granted in doing this myself, which is that it's an ego

struggle, right? You want to look like you know this stuff. You want to look smart. I mean, You want to sound smart when you're talking to the scientists you're talking to, but you also want to look smart in front of the reader. And we have this temptation to deploy complicated jargon as a way of signaling that we know what we're talking about. And remembering to always foreground the reader and the reader's experience that it's not really about us, that it is actually about how the reader is going to receive this is a constant struggle. I would just add that I find that usually when I have jargon, if my editor asks me, well, what does this mean? It's usually the opposite where I realize that I actually don't really grasp what is being expressed. And I feel like jargon might feel sort of like an armor, but I always feel like underneath it, if you're using jargon, it's because you haven't found the simpler, clear way to say what that is really, what that jargon is really saying in language terms. what did you mean by this is probably the thing I ask my students most.

Carl, do you hear yourself saying that a lot as well in your class? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it's, and it's, you know, it's not fun when, you know, you're a student and the teacher says, well, what did you mean by this? And you're like, I don't actually know. But, you know, like, it's good to like have that little revelation. And then you go and you rewrite and you come back and it's always much better. Yeah, I find that that happens a lot in my scripting as well, but I'm like, I don't need to say this. So it's a good skill to have is just like asking yourself what's important for all kinds of writing.

Wow, more great questions from our audience. We've got one here, which reads, do you consider writing style and accessibility or purely the scientific merit of an article in making selections? Jamie and Carl, this one looks like it's for you. Carl, what do you think? Is that writing style on your mind? Is it just like the science story that's being told? It's both. You know, you know, you can be writing about a scientifically important story, but, you know,

I mean, if it's full of cliches, if it's dry, like, I probably don't feel like reading it, so I wouldn't want to inflict it on readers of this book. And it's great when people find an important subject and bring a style to it. You know, McCormel surprises you. Maggie Kerth has a piece in the article called The Butterfly Effect, which is about extinction, about species disappearing. focusing on one butterfly and how it kind of almost depends on us now for its survival. It's very funny and quirky and she cracks jokes.

And you're, you know, you start thinking like, what is that appropriate? Like, but actually, yeah, it works. It's there of this, I don't know if you call it Gallo's humor or something, but it really works. She's got, she's got her own style and her own voice. And that was what drew me to that. The other than the spectrum of something is just all stuff. and, you know, and it's sort of puffing up a story that really is not that important.

That I would not pick for a series like this either. Jamie, anything to add? Yeah, I think for me, because I'm not making the final decisions, I'm like finding, you know, a bunch of candidates. writing style and sort of the quality and wonderfulness of the prose is an absolute requirement for me. It's also the thing that I am more capable of judging. You know, if I'm reading an article about a physics breakthrough, I'm going to have to trust the writer on that one.

You know, like, I don't know. So I'm more focused on looking for great writing about. science and nature. But if a story is interesting, if the subject matter is interesting, as surprising, is exciting, is important, that contributes to that, the sense of the piece is power. But, you know, I'm thinking one of my, one of the most memorable pieces from, so this is my fifth anthology that I've been series editor for. One of the pieces that I think about the most often was from the 2019 book, which was the first one that I worked on. It was about paper jams. It's called Why Paper Jams Persist. And it was fascinating. And that, I mean, so that's not,

if we talk about scientific merit, also like, what does that mean? Are you talking about validity, correctness or importance? You know, what is the most meaningful science or technology? It's not paper jams. but it was just so interesting. And I'm still, anytime someone's on Facebook complaining about their printer, first I recommend the printer I have, which is like the brother black and white, which works great,

but then I send them this link because it is just like, why are there still paper jams? It's just, I still get so excited about this piece about paper jams. So I think that obviously shows that my answer is slightly more about writing style and storytelling. but the science does need to at least by my smell test seem valid as well.

Yeah, I would imagine so. A few people had questions about fact-checking the stories as well. I mean, all of these stories, because they are published in these like reputable spaces in advance, I'm sure they also get fact-checked, you know, before they are published. I mean, I would, no, yeah, no, I would. guess that, I mean, it depends on the publications, but I would guess it comes down to maybe a quarter of them, half of them have been fact checked. Fact checking is sad. I mean, Barron, I haven't looked at like which publications, but we have literary journals in here.

They're not fact checking. I know some, you know, website magazines are not fact checking. So fact checking is not a default. And we are not able to refaqing. And we are not able to refurb. fact-check the stories. You know, we copy-edit looking for mistakes, but for the most part, the stories are printed as they were printed in their original publications. But, you know, I saw someone mentioning, like, books as well, just in case anyone is not aware of this, non-fiction books are not by default fact-checked either. Publications copy edit, or publishers copy-ed it, they do not fact-check. If the book is fact-checked, the author has either paid for it themselves or somehow gotten additional funding for that. So,

Are we raising hands because we got additional funding to fact check our books? Yes. Well, because I paid for it myself. Right, right. I got a grant to do it because my advance would not have quite covered it. So, yeah, it's tricky. It's tricky, is what I will say. Yeah.

Speaking of tricky, Marian, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your experience as a freelance science writer. That's probably very different from people who have been a. or, you know, want to be at some point a staff writer. Can you talk a little bit about sort of like the pros and cons of that experience? Yeah. Yes, where to start. Well, I know, I know, Marin, you've done both too, right? You've been, yeah.

But so I think that there's quite a few negative. There's quite a few drawbacks to being a freelancer. And I think that if you've ever talked to a freelance journalist, they probably told you all of these things, but the money problems are real, and it's not just low pay, even though I will recommend that the Freelance Solidarity Project does have a rate-sharing effort or website where people can share and look at rates, but it's not just sort of pay transparency. It's not just that we're paid at the end of the completion of a project, so when it's published. So like a piece like this one, that takes many months to work on.

on that usually means working for free until it's finally published and then you get paid all at once, which is not a super, at least for me, not a super healthy way to sort of live financially. Mentally, that's very difficult. But then there's also like just administrative stuff that you have to do as a freelancer that can be really burdensome putting aside money for retirement, dealing with figuring out insurance, reading contracts. And the last thing I'll say on the bad side is it can be. super, super solitary and super lonely because when you're a staffer, you have co-workers, you have

a regular boss or bosses, people with whom you have daily interactions. And for the most part, that's not really the same thing as a freelancer. But there is so much independence and there's so much, I think, privilege to that independence, right? I get to sort of decide on story ideas that I would like to do and then I shop them around. Right. I don't have one person who sort of says yes or know. So when you're a freelancer and you have something you really want to do, you can pursue that. And that's this kind of creative expression, a creative freedom that I didn't necessarily feel last time I was at a staff physician, although that was in a newspaper. So it's a whole different kind of can of rooms. And then to sort of relate to what we talked about earlier, I think that something that's really great about freelancing is that you also have this lateral space to try different formats. Not every publication is going to want you to use first person ever.

Not every publication is going to want certain story structures or certain lengths, whether that's really short or really long. There's a ton of freedom and a ton of creativity that I think is really important. I'm always really happy to see that in the collections there's a mix of both because I think that there is something to be said about staffers who can chip away at stories, who have resources behind them, who can put in time, and work beats and develop relationships. And then there's also something that there's something about the way freelancers are doing journalism,

but then also sort of like right against working really right in the face of like, what is labor, what is our labor, what is our profession, what is it worth, what is our value, and how much are we willing to, you know, what price can we put on that labor? and how can we, yeah. So a little bit of run on, but I think that even when you look at a collection like this, you can see how the way that someone's work is funded and the way that it's structured and organized

can be a real advantage or bring very particular assets to the final pieces. I endorse everything Marion said. I imagine probably a lot of people feel that way as well. It's a push and pull and the ways that it will get better is with better systems for the people who are doing this really hard and important work. So you're all science writers. Thank you all so much for doing this. Somehow we're like running out of time.

I don't know how 50 minutes have already passed by. I have one more question from the audience I want to ask you and then we're going to wrap up. Titus says I'm a freshwater ecologist and I don't see much freshwater science reaching these types of volumes. How can we get more people excited about their backyards? I'm going to kind of expand that out and say, like, how would you recommend people get excited about blank? Like, Carl, if someone says, I want to get people excited about these tiny millipedes that no one knows about, about their backyards, about the science of cutting incredibly small microbes. What kind of advice do you have for people who want to get people excited about a thing they're really excited about? I sometimes get into these conversations, sometimes like in workshops with science graduate students.

And basically I say like, well, I know it excites you. I mean, well, here we have a freshwater ecologist. Like, obviously he's really excited about freshwater ecology. Otherwise, he would not have gone to grad school and like worked crazy hours to get a PhD in freshwater Ordecology and then say, actually, I want a whole job in fresh air ecology. So what is it? What is it about that fresh air ecology? What is it about those little worms that somebody is excited about? That excites them. And it may sound weird. Sometimes it sounds inappropriate to talk about science in terms of emotions. Science is not supposed to be emotional. It's supposed to be like, here's the data. And you should

just be, want to read this because it's data. But that's not really how science works. That's not how anything works. We're people and we do things and we're motivated to do things. And so, you know, so, so, you know, sometimes somebody will, I'll say just as a grad student, like, well, tell me what you do. And at first, though, just give me a very cold clinical description of like, well, I study these group of cells. and be like, okay, like, are those cells cool? And be like, oh, my God, they're so cool.

And then, like, all of a sudden, like, they've sort of been given permission to tell you what makes them passionate about it. And so I think that, you know, people who, particularly scientists who want, you know, scientists are welcome to write in the first person and tell us about these things. They need to tap into that and let that. And so that we can share that. I mean, because a lot of what all writing in is is communication where, you know, two people's minds are being brought together. And part of that is sharing a state of mind, an emotional state of mind. And so you need to be aware of that and not just be such a scientist. Jamie, anything to add?

I mean, this is, so it's, you know, when you say how can we get more people excited about their backyard? I'm wondering, like, are those people the readers or is the problem about reaching the writers, you know? And as for how writers find what they're interested in, and apologies if anyone can hear my dog barking in the other room, he knows that my son is about to get home from school. He's really excited. You know, I think about how I got interested in what I, like, there are science writers who are interested in everything. And so that, that's, you know, I think about how I got interested in what I, like, there are science writers who are interested in everything. And so, that. That makes me wonder, like, what are the stories in freshwater ecology? What are the exciting discoveries? What is the motivation for wanting to share these stories? You know, like, is it scientifically important? Is there a cool narrative? Is it just some fabulous cool thing where you want a writer to show it to the audience and say, like,

look how cool this is, which is honestly, like, how I do most of my writing? because this is this is another thing that like because I also teach and I think about like what is the reason for being for this piece you know and so like why should people be excited about their backyards is it the sort of like romance of oh there's all this amazing science right here or is it you know what are the stakes to not understanding the science so that's something to think about but then like there's sort of logistic a few steps in between the scientist and the reader. You know, there's the writer, there's the publication, there might be a publicist or a press officer at the institution. So as for like how that all happens, that I don't know. There's a lot of people along the way.

Go ahead, Marian. If I can just add something. I think there's also something specific about water and water that is not the ocean. And I don't mean that like freshwater and and salt water. I just mean, I think that readers and journalists, I think conceptually where our water comes from, what that actually means, what the actual answer is, and also aquifers, asking a person to understand.

There's something specific about water that I think is just genuinely difficult to write about. Yeah, and so I feel like this person has put their finger has put their finger on something that's very real is that there are some subjects that are fascinating when you look at the science and learn what's living in them or how they work or how the systems work. But I do think it's like sort of a slippery kind of subject for some reason. Nice, slippery. I don't know if you did it on purpose, but no, I didn't.

Marin, what about you? Anything else you want to add? Is this where I get to get personal? Always. Is this our like, what happens next kind of question? Yeah, absolutely. So I was so thrilled to join this conversation because journalism is a very evanescent and fragile profession right now. Excuse me.

And almost all of the people that I mentioned who were responsible for this story coming to be, my features editor, my other features editor, my editor-in-chief, the fact-checker, at least one of the layout people, almost all of those people have left wired in the two years. since we conceived the story. So I particularly wanted to be able to sort of thank them in public for this story that now is going to have a life beyond the magazine and beyond the website in this book. So thank you, Jamie and Carl, for that. And thanks, Marion, for giving a glimpse into the freelancer's life because I'm about to come join you.

Today is my last day at Wired. I was laid off. So I am joining all the other people who worked on the story in being beyond the magazine and doing something different in journalism. So thanks for letting the story have a sort of second brief glimpse in the sun. Yeah, I mean, I have been thinking as I'm reading now for next year, how many people whose work I'm reading have been laid off, how many publications I'm reading. have ceased publication in the last year. You know, I'm reading pieces from National Geographic and Popular Science. And it is RIP to both of those.

Yeah, it is, it is essays from Catapult, you know, like where Sabrina Imbler's book started. Catapult isn't publishing essays anymore. Like the landscape for science journalism, the landscape for all journalism, but I think it's been real bad news. for science journalism lately. I'm really glad that we are able to immortalize pieces in this book because, you know, print, who knows, and website. I'm really sorry, Marion. It sucks.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm glad we could do that. And thank you for being so honest and open with us, Marin. I know that there are people in the chat also. who are staying their condolences. And you're right, this is the, it's never been more important to have amazing and

well-rounded and diverse science journalism and journalists in the field. And I really appreciate all of you for all the really hard work that you did, making these essays and this collection happen. And that's it for today. Tomorrow, two stories about some of our favorite things. chocolate and owls. We'll see you soon. Hey there, folks.

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