The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002

by Angier, Natalie

• ISBN13: 9780618082971
• ISBN10: 0618082972
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

This year's Best American Science and Nature Writing is another "ecclectic, provocative collection" (Entertainment Weekly), full of writing that makes us feel, as Natalie Angier says, that we "have learned something and fallen in love all at once." Read on for the year's best writing on nature and science, work that originally appeared in Scientific American and Outside, The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine, Smithsonian and the New York Times, and many others.Here is Malcolm Gladwell on the subversive nonscience involved in standardized testing, Gordon Grice on the recent incursion of mountain lions into our suburbs, and Blaine Harden on how a gritty, superheavy mud from the Congo called coltan helps power the new economy. Barbara Ehrenreich gives a stinging indictment of the cancer establishment's endorsement of pink ribbons over the medical realities of being a cancer patient, and Gary Greenberg teases out the confounding -- and ethically and emotionally fraught -- science behind what we call brain death. Burkhard Bilger wonders why westerners happily eat catfish and frog's legs but continue to balk at braised possum and fried mink, and Eric Schlosser uncovers the dark side of the science involved in making McDonald's French fries taste so good. In two especially timely pieces, Dennis Overbye explores the rise and fall of Islamic science, and Anne Matthews, in an essay on the ecology of Manhattan, paints a haunting picture of still-warm bodies of songbirds littering the streets of Wall Street before dawn. These writers and many more give us the very best, very newest science and nature writing. As Natalie Angier writes, "The universe is expanding. May our minds follow suit."

Table of Contents

Contents
Foreword xi
Introduction by Natalie Angier xv
Roy F. Baumeister. Violent Pride 1
from Scienti?c American

Burkhard Bilger. Braised Shank of Free-Range Possum? 10
from Outside

K. C. Cole. Mind Over Matter 21
from The Los Angeles Times

Richard Conniff and Harry Marshall. In the Realm of
Virtual Reality 24
from Smithsonian

Frederick C. Crews. Saving Us from Darwin 34
from The New York Review of Books

Barbara Ehrenreich. Welcome to Cancerland 58
from Harper’s Magazine

H. Bruce Franklin. The Most Important Fish in the Sea 80
from Discover

Malcolm Gladwell. Examined Life 89
from The New Yorker

Gary Greenberg. As Good as Dead 101
from The New Yorker

Gordon Grice. Is That a Mountain Lion in Your Backyard? 114
from Discover

Blaine Harden. The Dirt in the New Machine 124
from The New York Times Magazine

Robert M. Hazen. Life’s Rocky Start 137
from Scienti?c American

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Mothers and Others 148
from Natural History

Garret Keizer. Sound and Fury 161
from Harper’s Magazine

Verlyn Klinkenborg. The Pursuit of Innocence in the
Golden State 179
from The New York Times

Robert Kunzig. Ripe for Controversy 181
from Discover

Anne Matthews. Wall Street Losses, Wall Street Gains 185
from Orion

Steve Mirsky. Dumb, Dumb, Duh Dumb 196
from Scienti?c American

Judith Newman. “I Have Seen Cancers Disappear” 198
from Discover

Dennis Overbye. How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in
Science 210
from The New York Times

Chet Raymo. A Little Reminder of Reality’s Scale 218
from The Boston Globe

Eric Schlosser. Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good 221
from The Atlantic Monthly

Daniel Smith. Shock and Disbelief 234
from The Atlantic Monthly

Peter Stark. The Sting of the Assassin 255
from Outside

Clive Thompson. The Know-It-All Machine 266
from Lingua Franca

Joy Williams. One Acre 281
from Harper’s Magazine

Karen Wright. Very Dark Energy 292
from Discover

Contributors’ Notes 301
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2001 306

Excerpts

Foreword Every profession has its rite of passage, a crucible guaranteed to roil doubts and second thoughts about career choices. Pilots have their solo flights, surgeons their operations. For science journalists, it"s that first crucial interview when they realize, with mounting unease, that they don"t understand a single word of what some scientist is telling them. It happened to me several years ago. I had just started working as a reporter for Discover magazine and managed to convince my editor that I was ready to write a feature. One of the people I needed to interview for the story was an eminent physicist, a Nobel laureate. He graciously set aside two hours of his time one wintry afternoon in Princeton to talk to me about a perplexing problem in his field, a problem that was to be the subject of my article. I turned on my tape recorder and asked my first question. In reply the physicist said something about an "antisymmetric total eigenfunction." It wasn"t the sort of answer I was looking for. Worse, it wasn"t the sort of answer I could understand. From there the gap between what the physicist said and what I followed could have been measured in megaparsecs. For the next 7,200 seconds I had almost no idea what this kindly, renowned, thoughtful gentleman was talking about. Sure, I could recognize the odd phrase here and there, but entire sentences might as well have been transmitted in a frequency range audible only to canines for all they meant to me. Somehow the few questions I sputtered during the remainder of the interview didn"t betray my utter befuddlement and growing panic. For the most part I sat silently perspiring, nodding or grunting now and then to foster the illusion of comprehension. When the interview finally ended I walked from the snow-covered campus to the train that would take me back to Manhattan, wondering how I would ever wring a story from such impenetrable raw material before my deadline. Over the next few weeks, after many more hours of interviews and phone conversations with perhaps a dozen physicists, I finished the assignment. The work was grueling, but satisfying. That first interview turned out to be similar to many others in the years ahead. Although the panicky fear of failing to deliver a story eventually faded, the hard labor of translating the work of scientists into something that people will pay to read hasn"t changed at all. Good writing is never easy, but writing about science is extraordinarily challenging. Most journalists, whether they"re covering crime, politics, or business, can at least assume a common vocabulary, a certain degree of shared knowledge, on the part of their readers, not to mention their interview subjects. Science writers don"t have that luxury. First they need to understand enough of the subject at hand to ask relevant questions. Then they must mold their interview notes and background reading of sundry science journals into a narrative that a reader will not just understand but enjoy. Not an easy profession. Fortunately for us, there are many people who do it extremely well. The stories they tell are compelling, perhaps the most important of our time. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the controversial physicist who headed the Manhattan Project during World War II, once said, "Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics." The stories science tells us are not always comforting. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate physicist (not the one who so confounded me years ago), has said that the more physicists study the universe, the more pointless it all seems. Scientists have not found any evidence of a special role for humanity in the sc