In this provocative and headline-making book, Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet.In Denialism, Michael Specter reveals that Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially the institution of science more today than ever before. For centuries, the general view had been that science is neither good nor bad—that it merely supplies information and that new information is alwa...

In Higher Animals, New Yorker science writer Michael Specter explores how MRNA vaccines have transformed the scientific landscape and helped spark a biotechnology revolution.Biology is information, and increasingly, that means digital information. We need to think of biology the way we think about computer code, only instead of bits and bytes, we use the genetic letters: ACGT. The widely-used mRNA COVID vaccines offer the most immediate example of this gro...

The first audio biography of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the basketball loving kid from Brooklyn who became the most recognizable doctor in the world.New Yorker staff writer and author Michael Specter has known Dr. Anthony Fauci for more than three decades, starting with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. They’ve had many conversations over the years, but perhaps none as frank as those that became part of Specter’s audio biography Fauci.In Fauci, Specte...

Funny, thought-provoking, and incredibly disturbing, Slow Death by Rubber Duck reveals that just the living of daily life creates a chemical soup inside each of us.Pollution is no longer just about belching smokestacks and ugly sewer pipes - now, it's personal.The most dangerous pollution has always come from commonplace items in our homes and workplaces. Smith and Lourie ingested and inhaled a host of things that surround all of us all the time. This book ...

"A gifted and thoughtful writer, Metzl brings us to the frontiers of biology and technology, and reveals a world full of promise and peril." — Siddhartha Mukherjee MD, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The GeneA groundbreaking exploration of genetic engineering and its impact on the future of our species from leading geopolitical expert and technology futurist, Jamie Metzl.At the dawn of the gene...

Cancer touches more lives than you may think. According to the World Health Organization, one out of three women alive today, and one out of two men, will face a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime.To Ty Bollinger, this isn’t just a statistic. It’s personal. After losing seven members of his family to cancer over the course of a decade, Ty set out on a global quest to learn as much as he possibly could about cancer treatments and the medical industry that surrounds t...

As revealing as Freakonomics, shocking as Fast Food Nation and thought provoking as No Logo, The Politics of Breastfeeding exposes infant feeding as one of the most important public health issues of our time.Every thirty seconds a baby dies from infections due to a lack of breastfeeding and the use of bottles, artificial milks and other risky products. In her powerful book Gabrielle Palmer describes how big business uses subtle techniques to pressure parents to use alternatives to breastmi...

A New Yorker Best Book of the YearThe next frontier in technology is inside our own bodies.The breakthrough science of synthetic biology has the potential to help solve humanity’s existential challenges from climate change, to the health and feeding of millions, to fighting the next viral outbreak before it becomes a global pandemic.A promising and controversial science that combines biology and artificial intelligence, syn...

**A 2012 New York Times Notable BookA 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Award Winner in the Science & Technology categoryAn engaging narrative about an incredible, life-giving organ and its imperiled modern fate.**Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it’s sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is chan...

An investigation of the massive agribusiness company, from a winner of the Rachel Carson Prize: "Well supported by wide-ranging scientific evidence." — Kirkus ReviewsThe result of a remarkable three-year-long investigation that took award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin across four continents, The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant—the ...

Social scientist and mother Courtney Jung explores the ever-expanding world of breastfeeding advocacy, shining a new light on the diverse communities who compose it, the dubious science behind it, and the pernicious public policies to which it has given riseIs breast really best? Breastfeeding is widely assumed to be the healthiest choice, yet growing evidence suggests that its benefits have been greatly exaggerated. New moms are pressured by doctors, health offici...

Food safety is a matter of intense public concern, and for good reason. Millions of annual cases of food "poisonings" raise alarm not only about the food served in restaurants and fast-food outlets but also about foods bought in supermarkets. The introduction of genetically modified foods—immediately dubbed "Frankenfoods"—only adds to the general sense of unease. Finally, the events of September 11, 2001, heightened fears by exposing the vulnerability of food and water supplies to attacks ...