photo by Cathy Maier Callanan
I am a 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 window.) My newest book, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, is now out in paperback, and foreign rights have been sold in 12 languages. My books have been translated into Italian, German, Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, Spanish, and Korean with editions forthcoming in Turkish, Chinese, Romanian, Greek, and Russian. 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 Slate, Scientific American, Time, Wired, and The Atlantic Monthly. 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.
Some of my thoughts about science writing are in an essay, Inside the Black Box, which appeared in a different form in The Field Guide to Science Writing, and in the preface to Machinery of the Mind. I've also posted two pieces on 9/11 ("Order of Magnitude" and "Double Bind") that I wrote for The Week in Review section of the New York Times.
I am co-founder with Sandra Blakeslee of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop. My observations about Santa Fe politics and other matters are in my anti-blog, The Santa Fe Review, which includes glimpses of the surroundings through three web cams.
Here are links to my shocking appearance on The Colbert Report and an interview with Michael Feldman on Whad'Ya Know?
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. Knopf, 2008. Vintage paperback, 2009.
Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. James Atlas Books/Norton, 2005. Norton paperback, 2006.
A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer. Knopf, 2003. Vintage paperback, 2004.
Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics. Knopf, 1999. Vintage paperback, 2000.
Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order. Knopf, 1995. Vintage paperback, 1996.
In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads. Knopf, 1991. Vintage paperback, 1992.
Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence. Times Books, 1986. Tempus / Microsoft paperback, 1987.
Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
I keep a list of my articles chronologically and by topic. Here are my resume and a biographical sketch (including a picture of my high school garage band and a letter from Richard Nixon). More ancient stuff, like a recording of my discussion with John Horgan about philosophy of science on NPR, is also available 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.
