Reporting and essays
What Conservation Sounds Like, bioGraphic. New bioacoustic tools are revolutionizing scientific research and accelerating conservation efforts around the globe. (Also, abridged version at The Atlantic.
The New History of Autism: Special Report, Spectrum. For 40 years, the story of autism’s founding has been the story of two men. This set of three stories shows how their work was built atop the work of at last two other key figures, the first of whom was a woman.
The Quiet Scientific Revolution That May Solve Chronic Pain. The New York Times. New science is rewriting the book on chronic pain—and may make treatment more accessible.
The Devastating Allure of Medical Miracles. WIRED. The product of 9 months of intense reporting, this story pulls aside the operating room curtain to reveal an experimental field with catastrophic lapses in transparency, ethics, and patient care that, despite creating astounding levels of patient suffering, had gone largely unreported.
Climate Change Enters Its Blood Sucking Phase. The Atlantic. In northern New England, a climate-driven explosion in populations of moose ticks is decimating moose populations.
Why a ‘Lifesaving’ Depression Treatment Didn’t Pass Clinical Trials…but could still be a groundbreaking therapy. The Atlantic.
Lost in My Own Brain – What happened when I suddenly couldn’t remember the route to my kids’ preschool. An audio story told at Story Collider in Brooklyn, May 2012.
The Touch of Madness. Pacific Standard. What if we listened to what it feels like to be mad, instead of telling people their experiences are just sound and fury meaning nothing?
The Smartphone Psychiatrist. The Atlantic. Why Tom Insel quit the most powerful position in psychiatry to try the smartphone as a way to bring mental-health care into the 21st century.
Why There’s New Hope About Ending Blindness. National Geographic. My cover story on four experiments attempting to cure blindness.
The most terrifying childhood condition you’ve never heard of. Spectrum. A story of regression, mystery, and love.
The Social Life of Genes. Pacific Standard. Our genomes react with particular sensitivity to social experience — and for good reason. Winner of the 2014 AAAS/Kavli Award in Magazine Writing. Selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2015.
Clues in the Cycle of Suicide. The New York Times. It may seem perverse that spring and early summer should contain “a capacity for self-murder that winter less often has.” Yet it does.
If Intelligence Is the Norm, Stupidity Gets More Interesting. New York Times. Instead of hunting the genetics of intelligence, perhaps we should probe the genetics of stupidity.
Beautiful Brains. National Geographic. Believe it or not, adolescence is adaptive.
Genetics’ Rite Of Passage. Slate. On the humbling of genetics, and how the field is like Michelangelo’s David.
A Depression Switch?. The New York Times Magazine. An experimental brain surgery works remarkably well, raising questions about the nature of depression. Selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2007.
Buried Answers. The New York Times Magazine. The autopsy’s death is killing us. Selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing. 2006.
Reviews
Survival of the Prettiest. The New York Times Sunday Book Review. I review five new books on Charles Darwin, including ornithologist Richard Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty, which I found “both seductive and mutinous.”
The Fault in Our DNA, The New York Times Sunday Book Review. My reviews of Nicholas Wade’s “deeply flawed, deceptive and dangerous book,” A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, and Sharon Moalem’s much more constructive and entertaining look at rare genetic condictions, Inheritance: How Our Genes Changes Our Lives and Our Lives Change Our Genes.
Christine Kenneally’s Invisible History of the Human Race. Cover review, The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Christine Kenneally explores what DNA can tell us about our ancestors and the rest of human history.
On Galileo’s Middle Finger, by Alice Dreger. The New York Times Sunday Book Review. “Having hounded the researcher mercilessly, the activists attacked Dreger too. The bad news is that this was hard on Dreger. (More on that momentarily. For now, I’ll just note they called her son a ‘womb turd.’) The good news is that from this mess emerged not only a sharp, disruptive scholar but this smart, delightful book.”
NB: You can see more at my Authory site.