For my November edition of Friday’s Elk, I’ve got a couple videos to offer from talks I gave in October.

I first went to Harvard Medical School, where I gave a talk at a meeting of the Allen Frontiers Symposium. It was entitled “Braided History: Reporting on Human Origins.” I talked about the enduring old visions of human evolution–missing links, marches of progress, and so on–and how we need to transcend them to understand new fossils and genetic evidence. You can watch it here.

Later in the month, I headed to San Francisco, where I had a conversation with the writer Annalee Newitz about She Has Her Mother’s Laugh before a live audience. You can watch it here. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, November 1, 2019” →

First the bad news. Across the United States and Canada, the population of all birds has declined 29 percent since 1970. There are lots of other animals than birds we should be mindful of, of course, but birds speak to people in a special way. Even in the middle of cities, they can visit us from the natural world. And those visits are getting rarer, probably thanks to a number of human factors, from cats to industrial farming. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, October 4, 2019” →

Greetings! I wanted to get this update out in time to let folks in Washington DC know that I’ll be speaking about She Has Her Mother’s Laugh at the Smithsonian Institute on Tuesday. I’ll be in conversation with Kirk Johnson, the director of the National Museum of Natural History. Please join us! Details can be found here.

Here are a few things I wrote for the New York Times since my last newsletter:

“Scientists Find the Skull of Humanity’s Ancestor, on a Computer “

“Why Aren’t Cancer Drugs Better? The Targets Might Be Wrong”

“Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves? “

September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.”

October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books.

October 16, 2019 Boston, MA. Allen Frontiers Symposium. Keynote address.

October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF–in conversation with author Annalee Newitz.

October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium.

November 9, 2019 Charleston, SC. Charleston To Charleston Literary Festival

December 3, 2019 Nashville. Vanderbilt University. Chancellor Lecture Series.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

Originally published September 15, 2019. Copyright 2019 Carl Zimmer.

Happy news! She Has Her Mother’s Laugh won the 2019 Communications Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. You can read about all this year’s winners here. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, August 15, 2019” →