Tim Folger

In these days of fake news and pseudoscience triumphant, it seems almost quaint to read actual science from real and accountable news sources, but it is still a worthy effort. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 is a collection of the best articles and essays from American newspapers, magazines and journals.

There is always variety in these anthologies, but I thought the addition of “The Modern Moose” by Amy Leach was particularly brilliant. It’s a humorous piece with an show more imaginative whimsy that might disqualify it in many people’s eyes. I thought it was perfect. I also appreciated the inclusion of an essay by Oliver Sacks acknowledging that he would soon by dying and looking at the periodic table as a timeline of his life.

More typical articles focused on climate change. “The Siege of Miami” by Elizabeth Kolbert was so alarming I dreamed about the eventual disappearance of Miami underwater. Several I had read during the year, including the incredibly important “The False Gospel of Alcoholics Anonymous” by Gabrielle Glaser in The Atlantic. I have shared that original article a dozen times or more in hopes that people will stop believing AA propaganda and look to science where there is real success. The New York Times article on nail salons is included, an article that had an immediate effect in prompting changed regulations in the city.

One article was very discomfiting. “Begin Cutting” by Gaurav Raj Telhan is an essay by a former medical student describing the students’ semester long relationship with a donated cadaver used to teach medical students about the human body. My parents and my sister’s bodies have gone to this program and I have done the paperwork for myself. It was good to see how helpful and necessary it is, but still…gross!

It is impossible to read every great article on science and nature, so there is no better option than at least reading the annual anthology of some of the best. Science is under siege. The far right attacks science in the service of fossil fuel and chemical industries, enabling further environmental degradation and destruction. The far left attacks science in the service of counterfactual conspiracists who fear vaccines and peer-reviewed medicine and advancements in agriculture, but in the service of alternative medicine industries that are every bit as financially invested in discrediting science as the Koch brothers.

This year, as in every year, there is a wide selection of timely and important articles. This year, as in every year, many of them focus on the increasing urgency of climate change. Sadly, this year, as in every year, more than half of Americans will continue to deny settled science because facing reality might demand they do something about it.

Amy Stewart edited the 2016 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016. I was familiar with her for her historical detective novel Girl Waits With Gun so I was a bit puzzled by the choice until I learned she wrote The Drunken Botanist, a book about the plants used to make alcohol, Wicked Plants, about plants that attack, poison, and kill people, and several other science books about bugs, flowers, and the like. Her selections were wide-ranging, original and diverse, making for an excellent annual review.

★★★★★
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I really enjoy Sam Kean’s books and I see his influence (as editor) in this annual anthology -- the most enjoyable being that he created the themed section titles from protest signs at the 2017 worldwide March for Science following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example:

“So Bad, Even the Introverts Are Here”
“At the Start of Every Disaster Movie Is a Scientist Being Ignored”
“We Are Not Just Resistors, We Are Transformers”
“What Do We Want? Evidence-Based Science. When show more Do We Want It? After Peer Review”
“I’m Not a Mad Scientist. I’m Absolutely Furious”

I was distressed to read more about human effects on the earth’s air and waters…and sickened to learn about the amount of accumulated space trash. There were fewer entries about the biological sciences than I would like, and more about the physical sciences, but it’s a very good collection. show less

I've been slowly making my way through these Best American Science and Nature Writing collections from a few years ago. So far I've read the 2011, 2012, and now the 2013 editions. I've enjoyed all of them, but I think this might be my favorite of the three. Some of these essays, admittedly, have more worthwhile things to say than others, but I found all of them interesting, at least, and many of them very well-written. 2013's editor, Siddhartha Mukherjee, says he mostly tried to pick pieces show more he felt were about the process of doing science, rather than just about interesting results, which I approve of. But even more than that, it seems to me that most of these essays and articles feature, or at least tie in to, the asking of very big, broad questions about life, humanity, the universe, and the future. Also, for what it's worth, while the previous two volumes seemed to skew very heavily towards technology and biological and environmental sciences, this one has at least a fair bit of representation for subjects like physics and cosmology as well. show less

I read the 2011 edition of this ongoing series a couple of years ago, and liked it enough to eventually pick up most of the subsequent volumes. Maybe one day I'll finally get around to reading them all and catch myself up to the present.

Anyway, this one was also good, overall. Unsurprisingly I did like some of the pieces better than others. There is always a risk, I think, in writing about scientific topics in article-length form. You can never cover the topic with complete thoroughness, show more which can feel a bit unsatisfying, and there were a few pieces here that I had that kind of a reaction to. But most of them were well-written and easily held my interest, while a few were downright fascinating. (I think my personal favorite was Sy Montgomery's outpouring of unapologetic personal enthusiasm about the alien intelligence of octopuses.)

There are a wide variety of topics featured, including biology, paleontology. psychology, neuroscience, sociology, food science, and computing. But I couldn't help noticing that while the subjects cover organisms from microbes to humans; the behavior and workings of humans; and various things created by humans, from pollution to french fries, there's not much about the rest of the cosmos. There's no astronomy at all, for instance, and the only physics shows up in a discussion of quantum computing. I remember noticing a similar bias in the previous volume, and now I'm wondering if that's characteristic of the series as a whole, or down to the interests of the individual editors. show less