photo by Kerry Sherck
I am a science journalist and author working from my house in the Eastside historic district of Santa Fe, New Mexico. (This website is named after Talaya, a peak I can see from my office window.) My most recent book is The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery, which was a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. It was the third time I've been short-listed for the prize.
I've twice won the AAAS Science Journalism Award for my articles in the New York Times. I've also written for National Geographic magazine, Slate, Scientific American, Pacific Standard, Time, Wired, and The Atlantic.
A revised second edition of Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Physics was published in November 2023 by the Santa Fe Institute Press, with a new foreword by Douglas Hofstadter. Gell-Mann died May 24, 2019, in Santa Fe, and the second edition includes new material not previously available, including his FBI dossier and a revealing personal journal he kept in the years before and after his Nobel Prize. My first book, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics (published in 1984 and long out of print) has been reissued as an ebook in a new updated edition.
My books have been translated into 20 languages, including Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, Spanish, Korean, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Greek, Thai, Arabic, Turkish, Romanian, Russian, and Bulgarian.
My essay The Books in the Basement is in the anthology My Einstein. I described some of my thoughts about science writing in Inside the Black Box, which appeared in a different form in A Field Guide for Science Writers.
I am co-founder of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop and have appeared now and then on bloggingheads.tv with my friend John Horgan for a show called Science Faction. My observations about Santa Fe politics and other matters are in The Santa Fe Review, which includes glimpses of the surroundings through my web cam.
Here are links to my shocking appearance on The Colbert Report and a video of my being pickpocketed by Apollo Robbins at a consciousness conference on the Las Vegas Strip. I wrote about the experience in Sleights of Mind.
"Oliver Sacks and the Amazing Twins" and "Idiot Savants and Prime Numbers"
"My Letter from Francis Crick" and "On DNA's Anniversary: How Rosalind Franklin Missed the Helix"
"David Foster Wallace's Infinite Death"
"The Best Science Book Ever Written"
"Worlds Apart: The Dalai Lama Comes to Washington"
"Colors Are Truly Brilliant in Trek Up Mount Metaphor"
"On the Trail of the Illuminati: A Journalist's Search for The Conspiracy That Rules the World"
The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery. Knopf, August 2013. Vintage paperback, 2014.
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). An NPR interview about Henrietta Swan Leavitt was broadcast on All Things Considered.
The best way to reach me is by email.
