Best of 2014: Science Stories

I’ve thought about this story (an excerpt from Storr’s book, The Unpersuadables ) many, many times since reading it. It’s superficially about Morgellons, a disease in which people think that they’re infected with bugs or fibers. But it’s really about the nature of disease and diagnosis, evidence and belief. It’s creepy, fascinating, and profound. The best part about it is the way Storr describes these patients and their delusions. It would be easy to make them seem stupid or crazy or worse. But Storr’s writing creates empathy and understanding. The not-insignificant downside of this piece:…

Boyle describes an environmental tragedy that most of us never think about: light pollution. Her essay is broad and rich, moving effortlessly from a Chilean desert to newly hatched sea turtles to circadian biology to cell phone screens. It’s an ambitious piece with many parts, but it doesn’t feel heavy. I think that’s partly because of Boyle’s light touch, her sentences that often surprise and delight:

This story by Veronique Greenwood, about how her great-great-aunt discovered the element francium, is a story that starts off as a tale of tragic heroism but emerges as something far more surprising: It is a salve for our tendency to romanticise self-sacrifice without considering what that sacrifice means. It’s all of that, plus assured writing, and perfect structure.

When a catastrophic earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy killed thousands of people, seven of Italy’s top scientists were convicted of manslaughter for failing to communicate the risks to the populace. David Wolman covers the tragedy, the trial, and what this means about our ability to predict—and discuss—the unpredictable.

It’s a rare story that can issue an arresting call to arms without any actual exhortation. But this one is virtually all show, no tell, and the showing is done with refreshing, welcome, weirdness: it is part-memoir, part-reporting, and, most affectingly, part imagination. To bid us to reckon with Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease likely to touch virtually everyone in coming years, Kent Russell does his best to inhabit his own father’s failing mind. (“Calm. Remaining calm is the thing to do here, the old man concludes, glancing around the jetliner’s cabin.”) The channeling carries an…

It’s hard not to keep reading a story that starts out with human bones brushing against the author’s legs as she wades along the shore of an island in the South Pacific. And Brooke Jarvis’s essay on the effect of climate change on people whose homes are actually sinking as a result of it gets only more intriguing as it goes on. The story is great for how it humanizes a topic often discussed in terms of dry data, but it’s even better for showing how the visit to Papua New Guinea affects Jarvis, a veteran climate reporter, herself. “No amount of climate journalism prepares you to explain the…

If you’re a journalist who wants to speak truth to power, Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist who has been compared to Mother Teresa, called the “Gandhi of grain,’’ and whose opposition to genetically modified crops serves as an inspiration to food activists worldwide might not be the most obvious choice. Yet as Michael Specter shows in this devastating profile, Shiva’s influence and popularity have been built on positions that repeatedly fly in the face of facts, and that stand to have serious consequences for world hunger. I loved this piece particularly because Shiva’s claims are s…

For fifteen years, Richard Norris had a face too hideous to show. Then, one day, a maverick doctor gave him a miracle too fantastic to believe. Richard got a face transplant, a new life, and a new set of burdens too strange to predict. What's it like to live with a face that wasn't yours—and that may never quite be?