It’s hard to believe this will be the last Friday’s Elk of 2016. I just wanted to thank everyone for being curious enough about my work to clutter your inboxes with emails from me.

One of the advantages of sending out a semi-regular newsletter is that it’s easy to scan back over them and consider which experiences of this past year stood out.

This fall marked my one-year anniversary as a contributing national correspondent for Stat. Among the most satisfying features I wrote for them were a story about the struggle to find the molecular basis of memory, a piece about an experimental procedure to save a man’s life with viruses, and a three-part series about getting my genome sequenced. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, December 23, 2016” →

The writing life can be lumpy. Last week was so quiet that I didn’t bother sending out a Friday’s Elk. Today, on the other hand, I’ve got a batch of things to tell you about.
 

I’m a huge fan of the Longform podcast, a weekly interview with journalists about their careers and how they do their work. When I teach writing, I always make sure to include links to some Longform episodes on the syllabus so that students can get a sense of what it’s really like to be a journalist. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, December 9, 2016” →

Apologies for the long radio silence. This month has been full of distractions, and not just the election. I went to London for a few days to report on a scientific meeting about evolution and cranking out a story about it. It was published this Tuesday by Quanta.

Seventy years ago, geneticists and other researchers created a new framework for investigating Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Modern Synthesis, as it’s now known, has been a powerful tool ever since. But in recent years, some scientists have argued that it needs an overhaul. They’ve developed a new framework that they call an “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.” They hold that we need a broader understanding of the causes of evolutionary change. Scientists need to take into account the constraints on development, for example. They need to explore how species shape their environment, which in turn shapes their evolution. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, November 25, 2016” →

This week I revisited the science of Ebola.

In 2014, in the midst of the the outbreak in West Africa, I wrote a couple articles for the New York Times about how Ebola works and how it evolved. At the time, there were a lot of claims that Ebola was on the verge of becoming an airborne nightmare, which I tried to debunk with inteviews with virologists and evolutionary biologists. Afterwards, I wrote a new chapter about Ebola for the second edition of my book A Planet of Viruses, which came out last year. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, November 4, 2016” →

This week: a look at a globalist rodent…
 

A few years ago I clambered into some of the remoter corners of New York City’s parks with the biologist Jason Munshi-South. I watched him study the city’s wildlife, seeking to understand how New York was sculpting evolution. Out of that experience came an article for the New York Times. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, October 28, 2016” →