Best Science Stories and How They Work

Siri Carpenter, PhD, is an award-winning science journalist and editor whose writing and editorial work have appeared in the New York Times, Science, Scientific American, and other publications. She is the editor of The Craft of Science Writing, and she is cofounder, executive director, and editor-in-chief of The Open Notebook, a non-profit organization that is widely regarded as a leading source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers and serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Standing Committee on Advancing Science Communication. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

• IntroductionBy Siri Carpenter1. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Their Many Tiny Legs and Love the House Centipede”By Sabrina Imbler ∙ Defector ∙ Annotated by Mary Roach2. “Fatigue Can Shatter a Person”By Ed Yong ∙ The Atlantic ∙ Annotated by Amy Maxmen3. “Mind Blender”By Ferris Jabr ∙ The New York Times Magazine ∙ Annotated by Bijal P. Trivedi4. “CrossFit’s ‘Holy War’: The Rise and Fall of Its Science Crusader”By Stephanie M. Lee ∙ BuzzFeed News ∙ Annotated by Emily Laber-Warren5. “How Rising Groundwater Caused by Climate Change Could Devastate Coastal Communities”By Kendra Pierre-Louis ∙ MIT Technology Review ∙ Annotated by Paola Rosa-Aquino6. “Voyager 1’s Immortal Interstellar Requiem”By Nadia Drake ∙ Scientific American ∙ Annotated by Ramin Skibba7. “A Field at a Crossroads: Genetics and Racial Mythmaking”By Ashley Smart ∙ Undark ∙ Annotated by Shraddha Chakradhar8. “Seeing the River for the Fish”By Kamala Thiagarajan ∙ bioGraphic ∙  Annotated by Ben Goldfarb9. “He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal.”By Jordana Cepelewicz ∙ Quanta Magazine ∙ Annotated by Dana Mackenzie10. “The Truth About Lying”By Jessica Seigel ∙ Knowable ∙ Annotated by Sandeep Ravindran11. “How the Mixed-Race Mestizo Myth Warped Science in Latin America”By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega ∙ Nature ∙ Annotated by Debbie PonchnerAcknowledgmentsCreditsIndex

“A great piece of longform writing is like a beautiful building: you never see the undergirding that keeps the whole thing from crashing down. This book renders the invisible visible, taking us deep inside eleven outstanding works of science journalism. Writers at all levels will profit immensely from the illumination.”