What is life?
baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me--sorry, never mind!
It has been a weird year. Nothing even to do with publishing my book, just the sort of life and work stuff that, well, makes a person stop writing essays in her newsletter to the point that she’s worried you think she was just writing essays until her book came out and then after that stopped caring about sending anything other than self-promo.
It wasn’t that!
Which isn’t to say I have an essay today. Still working on reconstituting those creative juices (a phrase so bizarre and viscerally yucky that I hope you see why I’m not writing much these days). Before the end of the year I want to write something about the books I’ve read, and, if we’ll grant me the ego moment, a round-up of what I’ve published this year. And maybe the essay juices will uncongeal soon! (The image here is of refrigerated chicken stock.)
But today I am, sorry, once again writing to share some thing I’ve written and places I’ve gotten to talk about my writing and science.
The main thing is the publication of a long-gestating piece in The Atlantic, about the search for life and life’s origins, and one pesky unanswered question getting in the way:
What we really want is more than a definition of life. We want to know what life, fundamentally, is. For that kind of understanding, scientists turn to theories. A theory is a scientific fundamental. It not only answers questions, but frames them, opening new lines of inquiry. It explains our observations and yields predictions for future experiments to test. Consider the difference between defining gravity as “the force that makes an apple fall to the ground” and explaining it, as Newton did, as the universal attraction between all particles in the universe, proportional to the product of their masses and so on. A definition tells us what we already know; a theory changes how we understand things.
This piece came out of my book research, talking to and writing about the work of a couple of scientists who I just couldn’t get out of my head. There was more I wanted to say about them, which, for me, means there was more I wanted to think about and learn. I’m so proud of how it came out. (Thanks in no small part to my editor’s guidance.)
I also… have I mentioned The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023 here yet at all? It’s out? It’s great? And it’s Science Friday’s book club pick for December. Guest editor Carl Zimmer and I did an event with them and two of our featured writers, Maryn McKenna and Marion Renault, talking about the anthology and science writing and freelancing, and if you want to watch, it’s online here.
Finally, there’s a horrific war being waged in Gaza, maybe you’ve heard. It can feel infuriatingly frustrating to be over here, safe in America, a country funding this war, our elected officials ignoring our, for example, daily calls to their offices to leave comments as constituents. One direct way to help that I’ve found is to buy eSIM cards for people in Gaza, so that they can stay connected to each other and the world. Seeing the activated cards in my account is such a small beam of hope in the horror. If you want to do the same, you can learn more here.
Love you, more soon, I mean it this time.