John Seabrook is the author of The Song Machine and other books. He is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker.
Joshua Sokol is a freelance science writer in the Boston area. After working as a data analyst for the Hubble Space Telescope, he attended MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and since 2016 he has won awards from the American Astronomical Society and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing for his coverage of space and natural history.
Shannon Stirone is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and other publications. She covers the intersection of space exploration and society.
Natalie Wolchover is a science journalist based in Queens, New York. She covers the physical sciences as a senior writer and editor for Quanta Magazine, with bylines also in Nature, The New Yorker online,Popular Science, and other publications. Her writing was featured in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2015, and she has won several awards, including the American Institute of Physics’ 2017 Science Communication Award.
Andrew Zaleski is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about science, technology, and business. His features and profiles have been published by Wired, Popular Science, Outside, Men’s Health, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, Elemental, and OneZero. He lives in the Washington, D.C., metro area with his delightful wife and his dog, Finnegan, who is also delightful.
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2019
Jessica Camille Aguirre
The Culling. The New York Times Magazine. April 28, 2019
Stephanie Anderson
Radioactive Prairie. Flyway. March 1, 2019
Rachel Aviv
Bitter Pill. The New Yorker. April 8, 2019
Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith
Our Secret Delta. The Post and Courier. September 15, 2019
Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom
A Funeral for Two Birds. The New York Times. May 24, 2019
Jennifer R. Bernstein
In Search of Absence in Antarctica. Hazlitt. June 19, 2019
Burkhard Bilger
Extreme Range. The New Yorker. February 11, 2019
Willy Blackmore
The Last Stand. The Verge. November 25, 2019
Paige Blankenbuehler
How a Tiny Endangered Species Put a Man in Prison. High Country News. April 15, 2019
Brendan Borrell
Bullhead City, Arizona Was a Retiree Paradise. Then Came a Biblical Plague of Flies. OneZero. June 5, 2019
Lyndsie Bourgon
The Opioid Crisis Is Killing Trees Too. The Atlantic. June 5, 2019
Rebecca Boyle
The Dark Side of Light. The Atlantic. September 24, 2019
The Death of Anton Chekhov, Told in Proteins. Distillations. August 13, 2019
Ryan Bradley
Separation Anxiety. Popular Science. March 28, 2019
Hayes Brown
The End Times Are Here, and I Am at Target. The Outline. August 7, 2019
Eiren Caffall
Small Wonder: The Challenge of Parenting Through Climate Collapse. Literary Hub. December 18, 2019
James S. A. Corey
Dear Dawn: How a NASA Robot Messed Up Our Science Fiction. National Geographic. February 8, 2019
Meehan Crist
A Strange Blight. London Review of Books. June 6, 2019
Thomas Dai
Notes on a Metamorphosis. Conjunctions. November 26, 2019
Lydia Denworth
What Can Baboon Relationships Tell Us About Human Health? Scientific American. January 2019
Bronwen Dickey
The Remains. Esquire. October 1, 2019
Elie Dolgin
The Dappled Dilemma Facing Vitiligo Science. Knowable. April 5, 2019
Ann Druyan
Dear Voyagers. National Geographic. July 10, 2019
Michael Erard
The Mystery of Babies’ First Words. The Atlantic. April 30, 2019
Tad Friend
Value Meal. The New Yorker. September 30, 2019
Katharine Gammon
The Human Cost of Amber. The Atlantic. August 2, 2019
Sarah Gilman
The Rat Spill. Hakai. August 13, 2019
Henry Grabar
Oh No, Not Knotweed! Slate. May 8, 2019
Malcolm Harris
Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries. Pacific Standard. March 4, 2019
CJ Hauser
The Crane Wife. The Paris Review. July 16, 2019
Mary Heglar
After the Storm. Guernica. October 22, 2019
Eva Holland
Born to Be Eaten. Longreads. May 24, 2019
A Fatal Grizzly Mauling Goes Viral. Outside. May 23, 2019
Erika Howsare
Shovel, Knife, Story, Ax. Longreads. May 24, 2019
Sabrina Imbler
In London, Natural History Museums Confront Their Colonial Histories. Atlas Obscura. October 14, 2019
Rowan Jacobsen
The Most Controversial Tree in the World. Pacific Standard. June 25, 2019
Ghost Flowers. Scientific American. February 2019
Brooke Jarvis
Climate Change Could Destroy His Home in Peru. So He Sued an Energy Company in Germany. The New York Times Magazine. April 9, 2019
Ronald Fisher, a Bad Cup of Tea, and the Birth of Modern Statistics. Distillations. September 6, 2019
Katy Kelleher
Wet ’n Wild. Topic. April 27, 2019
Pagan Kennedy
The Land Where the Internet Ends. The New York Times. June 21, 2019
Roxanne Khamsi
The Darwin Treatment. Wired. April 1, 2019
Isabelle Kohn
Inside the Outrageously Prestigious World of Falcon Influencers. Mel. December 10, 2019
Elizabeth Kolbert
Under Water. The New Yorker. March 25, 2019
Rachel Krantz
Humane Bug Catchers and Celebrating Imperfection. Tenderly. August 16, 2019
Kate Morgan
Are We Killing Off All the Wild Buffalo That Still Know How to Roam? Popular Science. June 9, 2019
David Owen
Volumetrics. The New Yorker. May 13, 2019
Shannon Palus
Beta Blockers Were a Miracle Cure for My Stage Fright. Then They Took over My Life. Slate. June 25, 2019
Nick Paumgarten
The Symptoms. The New Yorker. November 11, 2019
The Message of Measles. The New Yorker. September 2, 2019
Lynne Peskoe-Yang
Vegetables Don’t Exist. Popula. February 20, 2019
Mallory Pickett
“I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars.” The New York Times Magazine. April 18, 2019
Adam Piore
Guardians of the Tiger People. Scientific American. February 2019
James Pogue
Send in the Clones. The Believer. April 1, 2019
Elizabeth Preston
What’s a “Normal” Amount of Time to Breastfeed?The New York Times. September 3, 2019
Emily Raboteau
Climate Signs. The New York Review of Books. February 1, 2019
Brian Resnick
The Silent “Sixth” Sense. Vox. December 2, 2019
Eden Robins
At Sea with Scientists, I Learned What It Means to Be an Explorer. Catapult. September 11, 2019
Julia Rosen
The Revolution Will Be Hard, Fast, and Frozen. Adventure Journal. January 1, 2019
Ash Sanders
Under the Weather. The Believer. December 2, 2019
Timothy A. Schuler
The Middle of Everywhere. Places Journal. November 12, 2019
Erin Schumaker
Is It Possible to Cure the Desire for Revenge? GEN. September 19, 2019
Sarah Scoles
What Astronaut Diaries Tell Us About a Mission to
Mars. Popular Science. October 15, 2019
Sushma Subramanian
Born to Swim. Hakai. March 28, 2019
J. R. Sullivan
Dirty Work. Men’s Journal. August 26, 2019
Ben Taub
Ideas in the Sky. The New Yorker. September 23, 2019
Nicola Twilley
Trailblazers. The New Yorker. August 26, 2019
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Animal, Vegetable, or Both? Making Sense of the Scythian Lamb. Lapham’s Quarterly. August 5, 2019
Ed Yong
The Blue Whale’s Heart Beats at Extremes. The Atlantic. November 25, 2019
Ilana Yurkiewicz
Behind the Scenes of a Radical New Cancer Cure. Undark. October 23, 2019
Visit hmhbooks.com to find all of the books in the Best American series.
About the Editors
© AsianBoston / Rob Klein
Michio Kaku, guest editor, is a professor of physics at the City College of New York, cofounder of string field theory, and the best-selling author of several widely acclaimed science books, including The Future of Humanity, Beyond Einstein, The Future of the Mind, Hyperspace, Physics of the Future, and Physics of the Impossible. He is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and host of the radio programs Science Fantastic and Exploration.
Jaime Green, series editor, is a freelance writer and editor. She is the associate editor of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. Her first book, about how we imagine alien life in science and in fiction, will be published in 2022.
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Footnotes
* Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals
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