I am a science writer working from my office in Santa Fe,
New Mexico. (This website is named after a peak called Talaya that I can see from my office window.) My newest book is The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. My books have been translated into Italian, German, Portugese, Czech, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, and Korean with editions forthcoming in Spanish and Turkish. Two of them were shortlisted for the Royal Society book prize.
Three of my articles for the New York Times won the AAAS Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one is included in The Best American Science Writing, edited by James Gleick. I've also written for Scientific American, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Slate, and Wired. I appear on bloggingheads.tv with my friend John Horgan for our show Science Saturday (with an occasional segment called Garage Band Science).
My essay The Books in the Basement appears in the collection My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-four of the World's Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy. Two others, Worshipping in the Church of Einstein (or How I Found Fischbeck's Rule) and On the Trail of the Illuminati: A Journalist's Search for The Conspiracy That Rules the World are published in the anthology Secrets of Angels and Demons, edited by Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer. I am co-founder with Sandra Blakeslee of the Santa Fe Science-Writing Workshop.
portrait by Cathy Maier Callanan, all rights reserved
I keep a list of
my articles, most of which are on the Web. You can
also see my resume and a biographical sketch (with a picture of
my high school garage band and a
letter from Richard Nixon). I record my observations about Santa Fe politics in my online journal, The Santa Fe Review, and provide glimpses of the surroundings through three web cams. A recording of my discussion with John Horgan on NPR's Science Friday is available on the Web, as are my Slate dialogues with Matt Ridley on the Human Genome Project and Robert Wright on The Quantum Computing Revolution. An NPR interview about Henrietta Swan Leavitt was broadcast on "All Things Considered."
The best way to reach me is by email.