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Interviews

Roxanne Khamsi

Roxanne Khamsi Explores a Potential Revolution in Cancer Treatment

One typically thinks of Darwin’s theory of evolution playing out in natural habitats. Over time, random mutations that make a species more fit for its niche lead to the giraffe’s neck, the spider’s venom, the bees’ communicative dance. Journalist and genetics junkie Roxanne Khamsi was intrigued to learn of a theory that cancer cells are subject to similar evolutionary pressures. She spoke to TON about the challenges and pleasures of tackling a math-dense subject with implications for extending the lives of people with cancer.

by Jeanne Erdmann · August 20, 2019 · Comments are Disabled

Apoorva Mandavilli Probes India’s Push to Eliminate Leprosy

Apoorva Mandavilli Probes India’s Push to Eliminate Leprosy

Leprosy’s victims suffer visible pockmarks, deformed limbs, and a lifetime of social ostracism. Yet the microbe responsible for this suffering remains elusive. Last year, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the country’s government had shirked its responsibility to patients and that officials had failed to count the number of patients correctly. The news piqued Apoorva Mandavilli’s interest and led her to track down how clinics and patients cope with this ancient disease.

by Jyoti Madhusoodanan · July 23, 2019 · 1 comment

Brooke Jarvis

Brooke Jarvis Uncovers an Insect Armageddon

Picture this: You’re cruising a highway in, say, Wyoming, ogling the badlands and buttes, when it hits you—your windshield is clean. A decade ago, you recall, this same drive left your grille looking like a Jackson Pollock canvas, smeared and spattered with beetles, butterflies, and grasshoppers. Today, your windshield is transparent as air, unmarred by so much as a flying termite. With growing unease, you wonder: What gives?

by Ben Goldfarb · February 19, 2019 · 1 comment

Elaina Plott

Elaina Plott Explores Everyday Life on a Sinking Island

Scientists project that Tangier Island, a fishing community in the Chesapeake Bay, might be uninhabitable in 25 years—but locals don’t buy it. In her Pacific Standard portrait of a cozy town fighting a changing climate and a changing culture, Elaina Plott shows what climate science and climate politics look like at street level. She spoke to TON about the power of asking sources basic questions, the keys to small-town field reporting, and why opinions and empathy might both be overrated.

by Olga Kreimer · February 5, 2019 · Comments are Disabled

Christie Aschwanden Tackles the Science of Exercise Recovery

Christie Aschwanden Tackles the Science of Exercise Recovery

Christie Aschwanden thought writing a book about how the body recovers from exercise and builds resilience for further challenges should be easy. In her mind’s eye, she could almost picture how the chapters would unspool. But as she dug into reporting and writing her new book, Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, she learned how mistaken she’d been—laughably so, she says.

by Siri Carpenter · January 29, 2019 · Comments are Disabled

Laura Beil

Laura Beil Dissects a Criminal Doctor’s Surgical Rampage

In the overwhelmingly popular podcast Dr. Death, Laura Beil chronicles the astonishing string of surgeries botched by Dallas-area neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch. Throughout the series, Beil grapples with what allowed such an inept surgeon to kill two patients and harm 31 others before he was finally stopped. And, she reveals that this could easily happen again. Beil tells Zamzow how Dr. Death fell into her lap, how she adapted to audio storytelling, and how she has handled the podcast’s success.

by Rachel Zamzow · January 22, 2019 · 1 comment

Science Photojournalist Morgan Heim Illuminates Environmental Cost of California’s Trespass Marijuana Grows

Science Photojournalist Morgan Heim Illuminates Environmental Cost of California’s Trespass Marijuana Grows

In 2012, photojournalist and filmmaker Morgan Heim came across a study in PLOS One about Pacific fishers—house cat–sized carnivores that live in old-growth forests in the mountains of Northern California—being exposed to rat poison in a place where they shouldn’t be: our national parks and forests. One of the suspected causes was illegal industrial-scale marijuana grows, also known as “trespass grows,” set up by drug-trafficking organizations. Heim immediately knew this was a big deal, and a big story.

by Christina Selby · January 8, 2019 · Comments are Disabled

Lizzie Presser Reveals the Underground Work of Home-Abortion Providers

Across the United States, there’s a secret network of women working outside the law and the medical establishment to provide cheap and accessible home abortions. Investigative reporter Lizzie Presser shares how she discovered their story and brought their work into the light.

by Aneri Pattani · September 4, 2018 · 2 comments

Linda Nordling Probes the Transformation of South African Science

Linda Nordling Probes the Transformation of South African Science

Reporting on the decolonization of South African science for Nature, Linda Nordling—a native of Sweden who had long lived in the United Kingdom before moving to South Africa more than a decade ago—found herself in an uncomfortable spot. She was passionately interested in the subject, but worried whether it was right for a white journalist from a former colonial power to tell such a story. Here, she talks about confronting those doubts and becoming the custodian of someone else’s story.

by Jeanne Erdmann · July 10, 2018 · 1 comment

Nidhi Subbaraman

Nidhi Subbaraman Uncovers a Story of Medical Neglect—and of Useful Anger—on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation

When BuzzFeed News’s Nidhi Subbaraman began covering the Rosebud Sioux tribe’s lawsuit against the U.S. government for its failure to provide treaty-mandated health care to tribal members, she discovered “seriously horrifying stories” of substandard care and neglect. Digging deeper, she found a narrative of not only hurt and outrage but also resilience and activism. Here, Subbaraman tells the story behind her story.

by Siri Carpenter · June 5, 2018 · 1 comment

Adriana Gallardo

Adriana Gallardo Finds the Untold Stories of Black Mothers

When ProPublica and NPR put out a call for stories about women who died or nearly died in pregnancy or childbirth, they got thousands of replies. But only 200 about the experiences of black women—even though they are most affected by this issue. That’s when ProPublica engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo got creative and used a StoryCorps model to get more black women involved in the conversation.

by Aneri Pattani · May 22, 2018 · 1 comment

Rebecca Boyle

Rebecca Boyle Excavates Earth’s Earliest History

Earth has a memory problem. Few rocks have survived from the first billion years of the planet’s history. This amnesia has made it hard for researchers to answer big questions like How did we get here? and Are we alone? But it hasn’t stopped them from trying. In a recent story for Quanta, freelance journalist Rebecca Boyle reports on the latest efforts to settle these existential questions. Here, she shares how she tackled the oldest story in the world.

by Julia Rosen · April 3, 2018 · 2 comments

Marshall Allen Unearths Waste in Health Care

Marshall Allen Unearths Waste in Health Care

Experts say the U.S. health care system wastes an estimated $765 billion each year. In a year-long ProPublica investigation, reporter Marshall Allen searched for the sources of these squandered dollars. His resulting series chronicles several cases of needless spending, including a shocking story about a nearly $2,000 ear piercing. Here, Allen tells Rachel Zamzow about what inspired him to tackle this gargantuan topic and how he found real people to make his story come alive.

by Rachel Zamzow · February 13, 2018 · 1 comment

Maggie Koerth-Baker

Maggie Koerth-Baker Explores the Legacy of a Very Prolific Panda

A quarter of the 520 pandas in captivity today are descendants of an individual named Pan Pan. As Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote last year at FiveThirtyEight, “Pan Pan saved his species by being really, really, ridiculously good at sex.” But Koerth-Baker also shows that Pan Pan’s story is as much about conservation’s limitations as its triumphs. In Pan Pan, Koerth-Baker found not only a protagonist, but a black-and-white avatar for an issue that is all shades of gray.

by Ed Yong · January 30, 2018 · 2 comments

Lizzie Wade Examines a Debate over the Origins of the Amazon’s Biodiversity

Lizzie Wade Examines a Debate over the Origins of the Amazon’s Biodiversity

In an award-winning 2015 Science story, “Cradle of Life,” Mexico City-based journalist Lizzie Wade tagged along with scientists trying to pinpoint the event that gave rise to the Amazon’s staggering biodiversity. The group trekked through the Peruvian Amazon on a grueling 10-hour hike, crossing three different ecosystems and many microclimates to collect samples that might offer clues to the region’s past. Here, Wade talks about her experience reporting and writing her award-winning story.

by Rodrigo Pérez Ortega · September 26, 2017 · Comments are Disabled

Maggie Koerth-Baker

Maggie-Koerth Baker Untangles the Story behind Trump’s False Claims of Immigrant Voter Fraud

On the campaign trail leading up to last year’s presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump claimed, based on a debunked 2014 study, that the election was rigged by fraudulent voters, many of whom were illegal immigrants. Coverage of the 2014 study tended to focus on its mistakes. But FiveThirtyEight staff writer Maggie Koerth-Baker wanted to find out why those mistakes occurred. Here, she tells the story behind her May 2017 feature “The Tangled Story behind Trump’s False Claims of Voter Fraud.”

by Jeanne Erdmann · September 12, 2017 · Comments are Disabled

Sruthi Pinnamaneni and Peter Andrey Smith

Peter Andrey Smith and Sruthi Pinnamaneni Interview a Doctor Trying to Untangle ALS “Reversals”

Almost all patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, die from respiratory failure, usually within two to four years of initial diagnosis. But sometimes, patients get better. Duke University neurologist Richard Bedlack investigates such ALS “reversals,” in hopes of discovering something such people share in common that could offer answers about the disease. In a January 2017 episode of the podcast Reply All, Peter Andrey Smith and Sruthi Pinnamaneni talked with Bedlack; here, they tell the story behind the story.

by Rodrigo Pérez Ortega · July 11, 2017 · 6 comments

Ross Andersen

Ross Andersen Writes a New Creation Story

Few journalists tackle mythic topics like resurrection, the biblical flood, original sin, sons making sacrifices for their fathers, and the ultimate fate of humanity. But stories of biblical proportions are what The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen likes best. In July 2016, he traveled to Arctic Siberia to report on a father-son team trying to reestablish an ice age ecosystem—including woolly mammoths—to fight warming that threatens the Arctic. His feature “Welcome to Pleistocene Park” appeared in the April issue of the magazine.

by Rebecca Boyle · May 9, 2017 · Comments are Disabled

Melinda Wenner Moyer Tracks Drug-Resistant Bacteria from Farm to Table

In a December 2016 Scientific American feature that was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and won first place in its category in the AHCJ Awards for Excellence in Health Care Reporting, journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer wove together the stories of contract hog farmers; the science of antibiotic resistance; the public policies that help perpetuate resistance; and researchers’ efforts to understand how the problem can spread from farm to table, and might spark more drug-resistant infections in people. Here, she tells the story behind her story.

by Jeanne Erdmann · May 2, 2017 · 1 comment

Mac McClelland Tails Extreme Birders through Cuba

Mac McClelland Tails Extreme Birders through Cuba

Mac McClelland has reported from hazardous locations around the world. So when her editor at Audubon asked her to tag along to Cuba with two birdwatchers searching for the elusive, likely extinct, ivory-billed woodpecker, she figured that relatively speaking, the assignment should be a walk in the park. But McClelland was in for a rude awakening. Extreme birding, as she related in a story nominated for the National Magazine Award, is not for the faint of heart.

by Lauren Gravitz · January 24, 2017 · Comments are Disabled

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley on Cooking Up the Food Podcast Gastropod

“Podcasts are an amazing way to connect directly with your audience, in a different way than print does,” says Cynthia Graber, co-host, with Nicola Twilley, of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the dual lens of science and history. “People literally hear your voice—they connect to you as a person who’s telling a story, and they come back time and again because they trust you. It’s a way to get into people’s heads—and their living rooms and their kitchens.”

by Jane C. Hu · December 20, 2016 · Comments are Disabled

Helen Ouyang Studies the Ethics of Compassionate Drug Use

In her June 2016 Harper’s feature “Hashtag Prescription: The Hidden Costs of Crowdsourcing a Cure,” Helen Ouyang tells the story of a seriously ill boy who might benefit from a drug that’s not yet FDA-approved. Leveraging social media to mobilize supporters, his mother pressures the drug’s manufacturer to provide the drug as a “compassionate use.” Though the issue may not seem like a dilemma at all, Ouyang shows it’s not so black and white. Here, she tells the story behind her story.

by Viviane Callier · December 13, 2016 · Comments are Disabled

Jessica Wapner

Jessica Wapner Knocks at the Door of a Drug Epidemic

Reporting for Mosaic magazine, journalist Jessica Wapner spent a week in Austin, Indiana, a town devastated by a drug epidemic that led to the largest HIV outbreak in U.S. history. Her mission: to try to learn what led to the heartbreaking conditions plaguing this town—and what might help stop the scourge. Here, she shares how she worked up the courage to knock on the doors to ask people whose lives have been torn apart by drugs to share their stories.

by Kendall Powell · August 2, 2016 · Comments are Disabled

Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert Stares Down Mass Extinction

In her Pulitzer Prize–winning 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert details evidence that human activity is driving the planet toward a sixth mass extinction. Rather than causing her to feel overcome by the horror of one possible future, Kolbert says, writing the book left her wondering: Will we face up to what we are doing? And what’s next? Here, she talks about reporting bad news, captivating readers with tales of nature, and turning magazine articles into books.

by Christina Selby · July 26, 2016 · 6 comments