Interviews

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.”

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by · September 12, 2017 · 0 comments
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.

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by · 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.

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by · May 9, 2017 · 0 comments
Melinda Wenner Moyer Tracks Drug-Resistant Bacteria from Farm to Table

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.

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by · 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.

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by · January 24, 2017 · 0 comments
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.”

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by · December 20, 2016 · 0 comments
Helen Ouyang Studies the Ethics of Compassionate Drug Use

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.

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by · December 13, 2016 · 0 comments
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.

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by · August 2, 2016 · 0 comments
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.

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by · July 26, 2016 · 6 comments
Apoorva Mandavilli

Apoorva Mandavilli Recounts an Unlikely Recovery from Brain Injury

In December 2014, Steve Mishkin suffered a near-fatal brain injury. But he recovered, for reasons as uncertain as the events that led to his injury. Writing for The Atlantic, Apoorva Mandavilli details the many “ingredients” that likely contributed to Mishkin’s recovery. Challenges of reporting the story, Mandavilli says, included piecing together a detailed medical narrative, investigating a stubborn mystery, and maintaining journalistic distance while reporting on deeply personal events in the lives of friends. Here, she tells the story behind her story.

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by · July 19, 2016 · 0 comments
Lauren Morello

Lauren Morello Examines Twitter and Sexism in Science

Twitter is a visible and sometimes volatile platform for decrying sexism in science. Some such online discussions do more than inspire memorable hashtags such as #distractinglysexy, #shirtstorm, and #addmaleauthorgate. Twitter, writes Lauren Morello, U.S. news editor for Nature, is a “megaphone” that amplifies the voices of those who might not otherwise be heard. And, Morello says, the platform has helped make people more aware of the challenges that sexism poses for women in science. Here, Morello tells the story behind her Nature story “We Can # It.”

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by · May 10, 2016 · 0 comments
Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn on The Death of Cancer

Few have witnessed firsthand the ups and downs of trying to treat a deadly disease: the frequent deaths, the endless suffering, the bureaucracy and egos that halt progress, and the extraordinary experience of discovering a lifesaving therapy. In The Death of Cancer, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn helps her father, Vincent DeVita, tell the story of his years immersed in the War on Cancer: the daily battles, the unceasing frustrations, and the victories large and small.

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by · March 22, 2016 · 1 comment
BillDeBuys

William deBuys Goes to Extremes for Endangered Species

Science writers often endure arduous conditions to report stories. Most of us love following scientists into the field, to feel part of their remarkable jobs for a while. So when William DeBuys says reporting on endangered species conservation while hiking through a leech-infested jungle surrounded by armed men and woozy with food poisoning was a “dream come true,” we don’t doubt his sincerity. Here, DeBuys shares how he brought the beauty and lament of conservation science to the page.

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by · February 9, 2016 · 1 comment
Brooke Borel

Brooke Borel Investigates a Scientist’s Bizarre Alter Ego

Journalist Brooke Borel had written numerous stories about the science of genetically modified organisms when she stumbled upon a strange discovery about a plant scientist, Kevin Folta, who’d been promoting GMO science on a podcast he produced under the pseudonym Vern Blazek. He insisted that guests and listeners understood his intent, though he’d never disclosed that the Blazek character was fictitious, even after he used both his real and his fake identities to interview himself on the show.

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by · January 12, 2016 · 3 comments
Stephen Ornes Explains the Science of Lightning to Young Readers

Stephen Ornes Explains the Science of Lightning to Young Readers

Most of us have experienced the moment of truth when thunder fractures the quiet of an afternoon and a stray lightning bolt streaks across the sky in the distance and we wonder: What are the odds that’s close enough to reach me?

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by · November 17, 2015 · 1 comment
Kathryn Schulz Paints a Chilling Picture of “The Really Big One”

Kathryn Schulz Paints a Chilling Picture of “The Really Big One”

Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker story “The Really Big One” opens in Japan, moments before the 2011 Tohuku earthquake. American seismologist Chris Goldfinger, who is attending an international conference in the city of Kashiwa, feels the room begin to shake.

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by · September 15, 2015 · 8 comments
Liza Gross

Liza Gross Digs into California’s Pesticide Data

If you eat strawberries and live in the United States, there is a good chance that you’ve had strawberries grown in Oxnard, California. Each year, Oxnard and the surrounding county grow more than 630 million pounds of strawberries—a crop that uses high levels of pesticides, including fumigants, which are among the most toxic. Writer Liza Gross spent months sifting through data to find out how pesticide use was changing around the state.

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by · June 9, 2015 · 2 comments
Resurrecting the Dead: Richard Conniff on Bringing Historical Characters to Life

Resurrecting the Dead: Richard Conniff on Bringing Historical Characters to Life

It’s hard to make a character seem vivid and real on the page, even if you spend hours or days with your subject. But in his 2011 book The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth, which profiles pioneering naturalists and specimen collectors, writer Richard Conniff managed to do this without exchanging a single word with his characters.

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by · May 5, 2015 · 0 comments
Virginia Hughes

Virginia Hughes Enters the Land of the Sleepyheads

People with a rare sleep disorder called idiopathic hypersomnia can sleep for days at a time and still wake to sluggish brains and bodies and often take extreme measures just to get out of bed. Science journalist Virginia Hughes immersed herself in the lives of the self-dubbed “sleepyheads” for “Wake No More,” published in Matter on January 26, 2015. Here, Hughes tells the story behind the story.

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by · April 21, 2015 · 1 comment
Phil McKenna

Phil McKenna Describes the Making of “Life in the Death Zone”

Two German boys—one from the East, one from the West—spent their teenage years birdwatching on either side of the Iron Curtain. Today, the former pen pals aim to transform the no-man’s-land into a Green Belt across Europe. To tell their story, journalist Phil McKenna literally walked into a minefield. The result of his efforts, jointly published at NOVA Next and at The Big Roundtable in February 2015, was a richly textured tale of conservation and friendship forged under the most trying circumstances. Here, McKenna tells the story behind his story.

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by · March 24, 2015 · 5 comments
David Wolman

David Wolman Explores Italian Earthquake’s Legal Aftershocks

Seven scientists and engineers were convicted of manslaughter after a deadly Italian earthquake in 2009, accused of misleading the public and creating a false sense of security in the months and days before the quake. In a feature for Matter, writer David Wolman rendered the victims’ families’ heartbreak, the science of risk communication, and the dangers of putting science on trial. Here he tells the story behind his story.

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by · December 9, 2014 · 2 comments
Seth Mnookin Follows a Family Battling a Rare Genetic Disease  

Seth Mnookin Follows a Family Battling a Rare Genetic Disease  

Seth Mnookin was drawn to Bertrand Might’s family’s story by a simple question: What do you do when you learn your child could die from a disease with no other known sufferers? Reporting for The New Yorker on the scientific and administrative complexities surrounding rare diseases. In his reporting, Mnookin discovered “remarkable amounts of grace” in the families struggling to understand and cope with their children’s illness. Here, Mnookin tells the story behind his story.

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by · October 21, 2014 · 5 comments
Erica Klarreich

Erica Klarreich Profiles an Award-Winning Mathematician

Erica Klarreich’s August 2014 Quanta magazine article “A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces” describes the career arc of Stanford University professor Maryam Mirzakhani, casting the mathematician—winner of the 2014 Fields Medal, often described as mathematics’ Nobel Prize—as a fearless and accomplished scholar. Here, Klarreich tells the story behind her story, including the decision to bury the information that Mirzakhani is the first woman to win a Fields Medal.

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by · September 30, 2014 · 4 comments
Michelle Nijhuis’s Nat Geo Adventure Began with a Word

Michelle Nijhuis’s Nat Geo Adventure Began with a Word

In her first assignment from National Geographic, award-winning freelance science journalist Michelle Nijhuis started with a one-word assignment: coal. Based on that single word, Nijhuis traveled from West Virginia, a top coal state, to China, […]

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by · May 20, 2014 · 2 comments
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