The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Organ Dealer

  Nature's Spoils

  The Chemist's War

  Fertility Rites

  The Brain That Changed Everything

  Emptying the Skies

  Fish Out of Water

  Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

  Letting Go

  The Treatment

  Cosmic Blueprint of Life

  The (Elusive) Theory of Everything

  Spectral Light

  The Spill Seekers

  New Dog in Town

  Taking a Fall

  The First Church of Robotics

  The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name

  Could Time End?

  Sign Here If You Exist

  Face-Blind

  Waste MGMT

  The Whole Fracking Enchilada

  The New King of the Sea

  The Killer in the Pool

  End Matter

  Contributors' Notes

  Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2010

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Mary Roach

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  "The Organ Dealer" by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. First published in Discover, April

  2010. Copyright © 2010 by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. Reprinted by permission of the

  author.

  "Nature's Spoils" by Burkhard Bilger. First published in The New Yorker, November

  22, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Burkhard Bilger. Reprinted by permission of Burk-

  hard Bilger. Excerpt from the lyrics to "Human(e) Meat (The Flensing of Sandor

  Katz)" are reprinted by permission of Propagandhi.

  "The Chemist's War" by Deborah Blum. First published in Slate, February 19,

  2010 (www.Slate.com). Copyright © 2010 by Deborah Blum. Reprinted by permis-

  sion of Slate.

  "Fertility Rites" by Jon Cohen. First published in The Atlantic, October 2010.

  Adapted from Almost Chimpanzee: Searching for What Makes Us Human in Rainforests,

  Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos by Jon Cohen. Copyright © 2010 by Jon Cohen. Reprinted

  by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  "The Brain That Changed Everything" by Luke Dittrich. First published in Es-

  quire, November 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Luke Dittrich. Reprinted by permission

  of Luke Dittrich.

  "Emptying the Skies" by Jonathan Franzen. First published in The New Yorker, July

  28, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Franzen. Reprinted by permission of Jona-

  than Franzen.

  "Fish Out of Water" by Ian Frazier. First published in The New Yorker, October 25,

  2010. Copyright © 2010 by Ian Frazier. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie

  Agency, LLC.

  "Lies, Damn Lies, and Medical Science" by David H. Freedman. First published in

  The Atlantic, November 2010. Copyright © 2010 by David H. Freedman. Reprinted

  by permission of David H. Freedman.

  "Letting Go" by Atul Gawande. First published in The New Yorker, August 2, 2010.

  Copyright © 2010 by Atul Gawande. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Treatment" by Malcolm Gladwell. First published in The New Yorker, May 17,

  2010. Copyright © 2010 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted by permission of the

  author.

  "Cosmic Blueprint of Life" by Andrew Grant. First published in Discover, Novem-

  ber 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Discover. Reprinted by permission.

  "The (Elusive) Theory of Everything" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodi-

  now. First published in Scientific American, October 2010. Reprinted by permission

  of the authors.

  "The Spill Seekers" by Rowan Jacobsen. First published in Outside, November

  2010. Copyright © 2011 by Rowan Jacobsen. Reprinted by permission of Rowan

  Jacobsen.

  "New Dog in Town" by Christopher Ketcham. First published in Orion, Septem-

  ber/October 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Ketcham. Reprinted by per-

  mission of the author.

  "Taking a Fall" by Dan Koeppel. First published in Popular Mechanics, February

  2010. Copyright © 2010 by Dan Koeppel. Reprinted by permission of Dan Koep-

  pel.

  "The First Church of Robotics" by Jaron Lanier. First published in the New York

  Times, August 9, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Jaron Lanier. Reprinted by permission

  of the author.

  "Spectral Light" by Amy Irvine McHarg. First published in Orion, January/Febru-

  ary 2010. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Irvine McHarg. Reprinted by permission of

  Amy Irvine McHarg.

  "The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name" by Jon Mooallem. First published in

  the New York Times Magazine, March 31, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Jon Mooallem.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Could Time End?" by George Musser. First published in Scientific American, Sep-

  tember 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Scientific American, a division of Nature Amer-

  ica, Inc. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

  "Sign Here If You Exist" by Jill Sisson Quinn. First published in Ecotone, Fall 2010.

  Copyright © 2010 by Jill Sisson Quinn. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Face-Blind" by Oliver Sacks. First published in The New Yorker, August 30, 2010.

  From The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks, copyright © 2010 by Oliver Sacks. Used by per-

  mission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Knopf Canada.

  "Waste MGMT" by Evan I. Schwartz. First published in Wired, June 2010. Copy-

  right © 2010 by Evan I. Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of Evan I. Schwartz.

  "The Whole Fracking Enchilada" by Sandra Steingraber. First published in Orion,

  September/October 2010. Copyright © 2010
by Sandra Steingraber. Reprinted by

  permission of the author.

  "The New King of the Sea" by Abigail Tucker. First published in Smithsonian, July/

  August 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Abigail Tucker. Reprinted by permission of the

  author.

  "The Killer in the Pool" by Tim Zimmermann. First published in Outside, July

  2010. Copyright © 2011 by Tim Zimmermann. Reprinted by permission of Tim

  Zimmermann.

  Foreword

  ONE DAY LAST February a team of NASA scientists made an astonishing announcement. A space telescope named Kepler, launched in March 2009, had found 1,235 planets orbiting other stars. Astronomers cautioned that they would need years to confirm the discovery completely, but there's little doubt that most of the new planets will survive scrutiny. In one stroke the number of planets in our galaxy more than doubled; as recently as twenty years ago the only known planets were those in our own solar system. For the first time in history we now know that planetary systems are common in the universe, which raises considerably the odds that life—perhaps even intelligent life—may exist elsewhere in the cosmos. Geoff Marcy, an astronomer on the Kepler team, could barely contain his excitement.

  "It really is a historic moment," he told me during a chat in his office on the University of California campus in Berkeley. "I really think February 3, 2011"—the date NASA released the news—"will be remembered for a long time. It was a moment when all the interested members of our species, no matter what continent they lived on, realized that the Milky Way galaxy is just teeming with Earth-size planets. What Kepler is doing is literally finding new worlds—not metaphorical worlds, but actual worlds. This really is an extraordinary new chapter in human history."

  The new chapter—one of the great discoveries of the ages—made headlines for a day, and then ... our collective attention moved on. The Super Bowl was only a few days away; protesters were massing in Cairo's Tahrir Square. A thousand new worlds, some of which might be habitable? Yesterday's news. It made me wonder what cultural life might have been like, say, in Galileo's time, if Renaissance Italy had been plagued by a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Would endlessly recycled rumors of a papal scandal have eclipsed Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter in 1610? Or maybe a hit reality stage show—Growing Up Medici—would have so distracted officials of the Inquisition that they wouldn't have cared when Galileo claimed that Earth orbited the sun, and the old man would have been spared his sentence of lifetime house arrest.

  So give the Inquisitors some credit. They tortured; they burned; they broke wills—but they knew a turning point in history when they saw one, even if they did their best to suppress it. They must have thought they were doing the right thing. Maybe they even imagined that future generations would be grateful for their efforts. But who now remembers the name of the pope who reigned when Galileo was imprisoned? (It was Paul V, but I had to look it up.) Four hundred years from now, if our species survives, it's probably safe to assume that the wars of our time—not to mention our leaders and celebrities—will be forgotten. The year 2011 may well be remembered as the time when we learned that our world was but one of many in the galaxy. And who knows? In another four centuries we may have found that we're not alone in the universe.

  Although astronomers don't yet know whether any of the planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope harbor life, there's good evidence that the raw ingredients for life are as common as space dust. One of the articles in this year's anthology, "Cosmic Blueprint of Life," by Andrew Grant, informs us that some of the complex organic molecules that are essential for life apparently form spontaneously in interstellar space. These compounds may have been the seeds from which life on Earth began—and if it happened here...

  After pondering the question of life's beginnings, you might want to consider a provocative meditation on the nature of reality presented by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in "The (Elusive) Theory of Everything." In just two mind-bending pages they make a compelling case that physicists will never develop an overarching "theory of everything." The universe, they argue, is too complex ever to be tamed by any single theory, no matter how elegant. I don't know what the Inquisitors would have thought about this, but I think house arrest would be the best that Hawking and Mlodinow could hope for.

  As exciting as it would be to find evidence of life on other worlds, our own planet abounds with strange—and disturbing—examples of the often savage forms life can take. Jill Sisson Quinn's transcendent "Sign Here If You Exist" challenges us to consider what we can learn about the nature of reality, the existence of God, and our notions of immortality from the fierce ichneumon wasp. It's an unforgettable story.

  And there are many others in this collection, from Tim Zimmermann's gripping account of a fatal encounter with a killer whale at a marine park to Christopher Ketcham's surprising "New Dog in Town," in which we learn that the resurgence of a certain wily predator may be a sign that something is seriously wrong with wildlife habitat in North America. Mary Roach will tell you more about these and other stories in the pages ahead, and you would be hard-pressed to find a wittier, more knowledgeable guide to the world of science and nature writing in this corner of the Milky Way.

  I hope that readers, writers, and editors will nominate their favorite articles for next year's anthology at http://timfolger.net/fo-rums. The criteria for submissions and deadlines, and the address to which entries should be sent, can be found in the "news and announcements" forum on my website. Once again this year I'm offering an incentive to enlist readers to scour the nation in search of good science and nature writing: send me an article that I haven't found, and if the article makes it into the anthology, I'll mail you a free copy of next year's edition. I'll sign it, and so will Mary. Right, Mary? I also encourage readers to use the forums to leave feedback about the collection and to discuss all things scientific. The best way for publications to guarantee that their articles are considered for inclusion in the anthology is to place me on their subscription list, using the address posted in the news and announcements section of the forums.

  It has been a delight working with Mary Roach; I'm looking forward to reading her latest book, Packing for Mars. Once again this year I'm grateful to Amanda Cook and Meagan Stacey at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for making this book possible, and for their forgiveness of missed deadlines. And, as always, I would be lost without my beauteous wife, Anne Nolan.

  TIM FOLGER

  Introduction

  AT A WRITING conference in 2007, the New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger told the story of an article he'd recently written, about cheese makers who flout government regulations by using unpasteurized milk. Bilger described a moment that, I think, goes a long way toward explaining the consistent excellence of his work. He had just spent three days with a cheese maker in Indiana. As he got into the car to drive home, a creeping gloom descended. The material was flat—he didn't have it. But at some point in the next round of phone calls, he heard tell of a cloistered convent in Connecticut making raw cow's-milk cheese. Nuns! Bilger got back into his car.

  For another writer, the sexy lawlessness of the "raw milk underground," as Bilger cleverly phrased it in his subtitle, might have been enough. As cheese stories go, that is practically a potboiler. For Bilger, it wasn't. His raw milk underground would be populated by Benedictine sisters. (To my delight, Bilger has returned to the topic of edible rot in 2010, with dumpster-diving, road kill–eating "opportunivores" standing in for nuns.)

  Very few people, I think, would tell you that they'd like to read a 5,000-word article about food safety and fermentation, which is, in essence, what Bilger's two pieces are about. People are not drawn to his writing for the science as much as for the things that bring it to life: characters, settings, stories, wit. These are the sugar, to be all cliché about it, that makes the medicine go down. Make no mistake, good science writing is medicine. It is a cure for ignorance and fallacy. Good science writing peels aw
ay the blinders, generates wonder, brings the open palm to the forehead: Oh! Now I get it! And sometimes it does much more than that.

  In "The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name," Jon Mooallem finds his nuns in an albatross colony on Kaena Point, Oahu. The birds and the woman who studies them become the narrative framework for a look at the science of same-sex animal pairings. Mooallem's wry eye for detail immediately wins the reader over. "At any given moment...," he writes of the scene at Kaena Point, "some birds may be just turning up while others sit there killing time. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area."

  The science going on at Kaena Point is a launch pad for something loftier: a meditation on politics and human nature. We have a strong inclination to view animals as mute, hairy (or feathered) versions of ourselves and to use—or distort—zoologists' findings to validate our beliefs and even to promote our political agendas. When the albatross researcher's paper came out (har! unintended!), it was lauded by gay rights activists as a call for equality, and at the same time it was condemned by social conservatives as propaganda. (Even Stephen Colbert got in on the act, denouncing "albatresbians" and their "Sappho-avian agenda.") The researcher was blindsided. "The study is about albatross," she said to Mooallem. "The study is not about humans." In Mooallem's hands, it is about both. As clearheadedly as he takes on the social coils and kinks, he delves into the conundrum of a behavior that seems, on the surface, to be at cross-purposes with natural selection. The result is one of the most balanced, far-reaching but never meandering, thoughtful, deep but witty pieces of writing I've seen in a while.

  Like Mooallem, Jaron Lanier, in "The First Church of Robotics," examines our eagerness to see humanness where it is does not really exist. As Lanier smoothly argues, the personification—and occasional deification—of computer intelligence not only overinflates the machine, it debases the human being. "Lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent AI's, [we] are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner ... In doing so we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings." Lanier's calm, effective prose lowers the flame beneath the AI hype, all the dire prognostications of superintelligent robotic takeovers. Settle down, it seems to say. Let's look at the facts.