Episode #9: "I Have a Tapeworm Named After Me"
On this episode, we're excited to bring you Carl Zimmer and Sadie Dingfelder
Carl Zimmer is the author of fifteen books about science. His latest book is Air-Bourne: The History of the Life We Breathe. Zimmer’s column Matter appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. His previous book Life’s Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, was a NY Times Notable Book of 2021, a Science News Favorite Book of 2021, and a Smithsonian Top Ten Science Book of 2021. His book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award, and The Guardian named it the Best Science Book of 2018. Zimmer is a familiar voice on radio programs such as Radiolab and is professor adjunct at Yale University. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom both a species of tapeworm and an asteroid have been named.
Sadie Dingfelder is a freelance science journalist. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic, the Washington Post, and Washingtonian magazine. A former staff reporter at the Washington Post Express, Dingfelder also served as senior science writer at the Monitor on Psychology magazine, covering new findings in neuroscience, cognitive science, and ethology for members of the American Psychological Association. Her first book, Do I Know You?, is a blend of popular science and memoir in which her late-in-life faceblindness diagnosis kicks off an exploration into the neuroscience of vision, memory, and imagination.
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One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best Science Books of 2025
The fascinating, untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside down
Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took over two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus.
In Air-Borne, award-winning New York Times columnist and author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. We travel to the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, and follow Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. We meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity.
Air-Borne chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox, and an array of other pathogens. Air-Borne also leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes—as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.
Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on Covid and other threats to global health, Air-Borne surprises us on every page as it reveals the hidden world of the air.
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An award-winning science writer discovers she's faceblind and investigates the neuroscience of sight, memory, and imagination—while solving some long-running mysteries about her own life.
Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she's a little quirky. But while she's made some strange mistakes over the years, it's not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (whom she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss.
With a mixture of curiosity and dread, Dingfelder starts contacting neuroscientists and lands herself in scores of studies. In the course of her nerdy midlife crisis, she discovers that she is emphatically not neurotypical. She has prosopagnosia (face blindness), stereoblindness, aphantasia (an inability to create mental imagery), and a condition called severely deficient autobiographical memory.
As Dingfelder begins to see herself more clearly, she discovers a vast well of hidden neurodiversity in the world at large. There are so many different flavors of human consciousness, and most of us just assume that ours is the norm. Can you visualize? Do you have an inner monologue? Are you always 100 percent sure whether you know someone or not? If you can perform any of these mental feats, you may be surprised to learn that many people—including Dingfelder—can't.
A lively blend of personal narrative and popular science, Do I Know You? is the story of one unusual mind's attempt to understand itself—and a fascinating exploration of the remarkable breadth of human experience.
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