Today’s the day! She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is now available in paperback.
You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.
I’ve been hearing from a number of book groups who’ve chosen the book to read, and I’ve even spoken at a few of their meetings, either in person or via Skype. Dutton, my publisher, has put together a free discussion guide. Check it out.
I’m giving a burst of new talks around the paperback launch. Last week I spoke at the Bloom Festival in Copenhagen. You can watch the video of my talk about the past and future of heredity on YouTube. Check out the talk list at the bottom of this email for more events.
Speaking of speaking–back in February, I spoke with David Quammen at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on the joys and challenges of writing books about science. Now our conversation is up on Youtube, too.
The Billion-Year-Old Fungus
Fungi are nature’s invisible giants. Now, with the discovery of fossils in Canada, their record on this planet has more than doubled. A billion years ago, it seems, fungi had already evolved and might have been growing on land. But land plants, their key partner today, did not yet exist. They would not evolve for hundreds of millions of years. So what were the fungi up to? Here’s my story for the New York Times on this thrilling discovery/mystery.
Also this month, I wrote about a milestone in synthetic biology. Scientists in England have synthesized a genome for bacteria from scratch.
Finally, here’s my “Matter” column on a quest to bring Big Data to ordinary medicine–led by a scientist who invented “the narcissome.”
Here are some of the stories that stuck with me over the past month:
Gene edits to ‘CRISPR babies’ might have shortened their life expectancy, by Sara Reardon (Nature)
How a Chinese Scientist Broke the Rules to Create the First Gene-Edited Babies, by Preetika Rana (Wall Street Journal)
Plenty of Fantasy in HBO’s ‘Chernobyl,’ but the Truth Is Real, by Henry Fountain (New York Times)
One million species face extinction, U.N. report says. And humans will suffer as a result, by Darryl Fears (Washington Post)
A million threatened species? Thirteen questions and answers, by Andy Purvis (IPBES)
Children Change Their Parents’ Minds about Climate Change, by Lydia Denworth
Saving Ecosystems to Protect the Climate, and Vice Versa: a Global Deal for Nature, by Sabrina Shankman (Inside Climate News)
Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science, by Coral Davenport and Mark Landler (New York Times)
E.P.A. Plans to Get Thousands of Pollution Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math, by Lisa Friedman (New York Times)
How a Half-Inch Beetle Finds Fires 80 Miles Away, by Jennifer Frazer (Scientific American)
Navigating Newsrooms as a Minority, by Kendra Pierre-Louis (The Open Notebook)
Huge Racial Disparities Found in Deaths Linked to Pregnancy, by Roni Caryn Rabin (The New York Times)
U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending, by Tim Dickinson (Rolling Stone)
Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today, Journalist Says (Fresh Air, NPR)
Viruses Can Scatter Their Genes Among Cells and Reassemble, by Viviane Callier (Quanta)
The devastating biological consequences of homelessness, by Amy Maxmen (Nature)
Shrinking Success, by Scott Stossel (The American Scholar)
The domino effect, by Raychelle Burks (Chemistry World)
Threats By Text, A Mob Outside The Door: What Health Workers Face In The Ebola Zone, by Nurith Aizenman (Goats and Soda, NPR)
Fighting Ebola When Mourners Fight the Responders, by Joseph Goldstein (The New York Times)
“5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review,”by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) [Since it’s not a great headline, here’s a snippet to whet your appetite: “How many of our scientific edifices are built on air? How many useless products are out there under the guise of good science? We still don’t know.”]
June 23, 2019 Providence, RI. Society for the Study of Evolution. Vice Presidential Symposium: Politics, the Public, and Science: Navigating the New Reality”
July 2, 2019 Lausanne, Switzerland. World Conference of Science Journalists
July 13, 2019 New York. Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism Keynote Address
August 31, 2019 Decatur, GA. Decatur Book Festival.
September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.” Details to come.
NEW–> October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books. Details to come.
October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF. Details to come.
October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium. Details to come.
You can find information and ordering links for 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 June 4, 2019. Copyright 2019 Carl Zimmer.
