The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017

Starred review from October 2, 2017
Jahren (Lab Girl) curates an outstanding selection of science writing from the past year in the latest volume of the series. Part one, Emergent Fields, covers new areas of scientific interest. Here, Maria Konnikova’s “Altered Tastes” investigates the subject and implications of neurogastronomy, while Kim Tingley’s “The Secrets of the Wave Pilots” looks at the ancient Pacific art of ocean navigation. The second section, Changing Land and Resources, groups together articles linked by environmental issues. For example, Tom Kizzia’s “The New Harpoon” and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “A Song of Ice” examine the effects of climate change on the Iñupiat in Alaska and the Inuit in Greenland. The last section, The “Real Life” of Scientists, is the anthology’s most accessible and focuses on practitioners. Sexual harassment blights the world of science, as highlighted in Azeen Ghorayshi’s “He Fell in Love with His Grad Student—Then Fired Her for It” and Kathryn Joyce’s “Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream.” Other articles celebrate scientists, including David Epstein’s “The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene,” a profile of amateur scientist Jill Viles, and Sonia Smith’s “Unfriendly Climate”, a piece on evangelical Christian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. The variety and skill of these articles should please a wide swath of science readers.