Rachel Fritts Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Rachel Fritts / June 5th 2020 / Alumni News

Drawing Lessons From Deep History, Annalee Newitz Puts a Pandemic in Perspective

As the world is roiled by the ongoing impacts of Covid-19, science writers are faced with the challenging task of helping the public make sense of a global crisis unlike any in recent history. While some writers toil to report breaking news, interpret new data, and explain the science of the virus, others are working to illuminate the underlying social and political context of the pandemic.

Former Knight Science Journalism Fellow Annalee Newitz (’03) falls into the latter camp. From offering early advice on prepping for the pandemic to analyzing formative disasters in humanity’s more distant past, Newitz, an opinion contributor for The New York Times, has sought to help readers feel more prepared and empowered. In a recent interview, Newitz spoke with me about the dangers of normalizing disaster (and why we should normalize survival instead), what we can learn from crises of the past, and how this pandemic could help writers talk about another looming global threat — climate change. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Rachel Fritts: You wrote the article “How to be a smart coronavirus prepper” for your New York Times column back in February. What inspired you to write that particular piece?

Annalee Newitz: That particular article really came out of personal observations, more than anything else. Like a lot of science journalists, I was following the outbreak in China, and it was very obvious that it was going to be coming here and that things were going to be really, really different. Culture was going to be radically transformed. I really wanted to record that moment in time — the moment when we went from total innocence and ignorance to needing to prepare for something really transformative and scary.

I guess you’d say I wanted to use that column to kind of gently ease people into preparing for a big disaster by encouraging people to think about the small things they could do to be ready, because usually when we think of disaster, we imagine an action movie where everything is exploding and there’s nothing you can do. And the only thing you can do is retreat to a bunker or something — like something beyond our capabilities. So, I wanted to make it personal, and to give people a window on like how they could actually do small things to make it easier on themselves and their friends and families. I guess you’d say the urge to write that piece came less from a sense of wanting to teach people about the science of the coronavirus and more about the social impact of this kind of pandemic.

RF: In that piece you write “normalizing survival is different from normalizing disaster.” Can you talk a little bit about what that distinction means to you and why you think it’s an important one to make?

AN: I think normalizing disaster is where we’ve been, as a country, in the United States for a long time. We’ve had political leadership who have come to power by representing the nation as a disaster, and by offering these apocalyptic visions of where we’re going and social collapse and this kind of unimaginable horror that is looming. It’s a way of causing people to feel paralyzed, to feel like they have no agency, there’s nothing they can do. I think that normalizing disaster is one way to cause people to hide under the covers and cry, rather than get out and vote or get out and join an organization to help clean up a toxic area or, you know, encourage green building.

So, I think for me the opposite of normalizing disaster is normalizing survival, which is looking at these big problems and saying, alright, we can survive this. It’s going to be really hard. But what we need to think about right now is not how bad things are, but how we can work to make them better, no matter how bad they are. I’m not saying look for a silver lining. I’m saying look for solutions and start putting money and energy into those solutions. In 10 years, I hope we can look back on this [pandemic] and say like, oh, we got through that one. Now we have a vaccine. Now we understand coronaviruses better. Hopefully next time there’s a pandemic, you know, we’ll be ready.

RF: With so many coronavirus stories coming out every single day, how have you been deciding how you personally want to contribute to this global discussion about the pandemic?

AN: What I’ve been doing is looking at the social impact of the disease and especially focusing on — because I do a lot of work around archaeology — how deep history can help inform present day policies. And so often when you do have something like a pandemic, or you have something like drought, you know, it destabilizes a political system further and so you wind up with people dying of some kind of natural disaster at the same time that they’re also dying from various political disasters. What’s really important for people to remember in the end is that even when a disaster kind of wears the face of being a natural disaster, like it’s a virus that naturally evolved or it’s a fire that happened because fires happen, there’s always a strong political component.

You’re always going to have a certain background level of death from any kind of disaster — unavoidable deaths that are tragic. And then it’s the role of governments and other organizations to come in and minimize the knock-on effects and minimize additional deaths. And we’re just not seeing that happen in a lot of countries. But as citizens, we can work on trying to create public policies and government organizations that help prevent the worst effects of these kinds of natural disasters, whether those are pandemics or climate disasters or other kinds of problems.

RF: In addition to working as science journalist, you also write science fiction. How has the pandemic affected how you approach your fiction writing?

AN: I think what the pandemic has done for me as a fiction writer is helped me think more realistically about global threats and how they unfold. Because what we’ve really seen with this pandemic socially is how varied the responses are and how varied the results are. And it sort of reminded us how much even though we’re a global society, we’re actually not. We’re a bunch of nations. And within those nations, we’re a bunch of cities and counties and states. And the fate of each of those locations is very different and working together across those boundaries is really important.

I’m working on a novel right now, and I’m not going to have anything in there about pandemics or medicine. I’m actually thinking almost exclusively about environmental issues and climate change. Living through this pandemic has made me feel like issues around climate change are more urgent than ever because that’s something that’s going to continue happening after this outbreak. And unlike a pandemic, climate change isn’t something that kind of spikes up and goes away again. And so I think we have a lot of opportunities now to use metaphors and ideas from dealing with this pandemic to help teach people about how to deal with global climate change and how actions at a local level can affect the globe.

by Rachel Fritts / April 8th 2020 / Fellowship Life

Meet This Year’s Fellows: Anil Ananthaswamy

During the southern hemisphere summer of December 2007, Anil Ananthaswamy flew to Christchurch, New Zealand, where he boarded a C-17 U.S. Air Force cargo plane bound for Antarctica. It was one of the last stops in a series of visits to telescopes in extreme locations for his first book, “The Edge of Physics.” When he reached the massive, frozen continent, he found that words failed him. “There’s no way to be prepared,” he says. Devoid of any familiar features like trees or grass or sand, “Antarctica was nothing that I could relate to.”

Ananthaswamy’s reporting is characterized by stories that confront the limits of human comprehension and illustrate our quest to examine our place in the world. Whether he’s standing on a frozen lake in Siberia or pondering the implications of the famous double-slit experiment, Ananthaswamy takes concepts to the edge of the map, where scientific understanding and philosophy meet.

As a college student, Ananthaswamy enjoyed reading popular science writing. But “it never occurred to me that that was something I could do,” he says. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras to study electrical and electronics engineering before traveling to the U.S. to get his master’s degree at the University of Washington in Seattle. He worked as a software engineer in the 1990s, but he didn’t find it fulfilling. He’d go home and write short stories, dreaming of one day becoming a fiction writer.

Then, a chance encounter with an acquaintance who had attended the University of California, Santa Cruz Science Communication program changed his trajectory. “That’s when something clicked,” he says. He applied for the program, and got in, graduating in 2000. Learning how to be a reporter “opened up a whole new world,” he says. As long as you could understand the science and follow through with the reporting, “no story was off limits.”

At the end of the program, Ananthaswamy was accepted as an intern at his dream publication, New Scientist. He’s been working with the magazine in some capacity ever since — as a freelancer, staff writer, or editor.

During a stint working remotely in San Francisco, Ananthaswamy toyed with revisiting his early interest in fiction, even going so far as to land a book deal for a novel. “I never wrote a single word of that novel after signing the contract,” he says.

Instead, Ananthaswamy talked to his editor about a nonfiction book, for which he’d travel to remote mountaintops to compare two types of human structures built to ponder our place in the universe: telescopes and monasteries. That book would eventually evolve into “The Edge of Physics.” He followed the book with “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” a more inward-looking journey into the neuroscience of our sense of self, and “Through Two Doors at Once,” a book about quantum mechanics written from the perspective of the double-slit experiment.

Ananthaswamy is using his time as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow to immerse himself in two of his interests: machine learning and the philosophy of materialism, which holds that all phenomena, including human consciousness, can be explained as physical manifestations of matter. To explore machine learning “from the ground up,” Ananthaswamy has learned Python and PyTorch — his first foray into coding in over 15 years. To get his philosophy fix, he’s attending a seminar series about free will with the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett.

And he might have finally found the perfect outlet for his interest in fiction. Materialism is still riddled with unknowns, making it challenging to tackle the subject using traditional journalism alone. But fiction would open up new avenues — including the possibility of exploring the philosophy through the lens of machine learning. With fiction, Ananthaswamy says, he can go right to the edge of the map and peek over, “to take a subject matter in a certain direction and see where it goes.”

This is the tenth in a series of profiles of the 2019-20 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Rachel Fritts / February 28th 2020 / KSJ News & Events

Author Lydia Denworth Makes a Scientific Case for Friendship

Be it zebras, zebrafish, or humans, strong social bonds are linked to a long list of health benefits, Denworth said at a recent Knight Science Journalism seminar.

“One of the things I have learned about friendship is how important showing up is,” author Lydia Denworth told a roomful of guests during a February 20 seminar at MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program. “So, thank you for showing up for me.”

The Brooklyn-based writer — a contributing editor for Scientific American and blogger for Psychology Today — was in town to talk about her latest book, “Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond.” She arrived wearing two brightly colored friendship bracelets with DNA double-helix designs, modeled after the cover of her book. Her hour-long talk took the audience on a journey through the history of the scientific study of friendship, how we’ve come to appreciate its evolutionary and biological importance over time, and how to nurture these valuable relationships in our own lives.

Fittingly, the science of friendship itself begins with a friendship, Denworth said. In the 1950s, psychiatrist John Bowlby teamed up with animal behavior scientist Robert Hind to study the bond between mothers and babies in non-human primates. Their partnership pioneered a new way of looking at social bonds as an evolutionary strategy, one that Bowlby believed extended throughout animals’ lives. Even after Bowlby formed his “attachment theory,” however, platonic, nonfamilial forms of attachments were largely ignored. “Friendship was the last relationship to really come under the scientific microscope,” Denworth said.

As long-term studies of animal behavior became more common, Denworth explained, researchers began to notice that a wide range of species — from zebras to zebrafish — appeared to spend more time with certain members of their group. In other words, they were forming friendships. And the number and quality of these friendships could strongly impact an individual’s odds of survival. A study of female baboons published about 20 years ago, for instance, found that social bonds appeared to matter even more to an individual’s health than its place in the group hierarchy. The females with the strongest social bonds lived longer and had healthier babies. “So at the same time as there’s what you traditionally think of as survival of the fittest, there was also survival of the friendliest,” Denworth said.

Humans, it turns out, are no different. Denworth described recent research revealing connections between the quality of our social bonds and a laundry list of health factors. Strong friendships seemed to improve cardiovascular function and sleep, boost resilience to viruses, and slow cellular aging. A 1988 meta-analysis of six long-term studies found that loneliness was as damaging to subjects’ health as smoking. Friendship, Denworth said, is “a matter of life and death.”

And the nature of friendship changes as we age. Denworth explained that while teenagers spend 30 percent of their time with friends, adults allocate just four percent of their time to these relationships. But the bonds remain important throughout our lives, even as it becomes more challenging to maintain them. Denworth cited research showing that a person’s satisfaction with their relationships at 50 is the best predictor for their health and happiness at age 80.

Denworth’s advice? Be deliberate about maintaining friendships, even in adulthood. Although life can get busy with work, romantic relationships, and raising children, she argues it would be a mistake to wait until retirement to have a social life. “That’s kind of like waiting to quit smoking when you’re 65,” Denworth said. “If you smoke from 16 to 65, the damage will have been done.”

by Rachel Fritts / February 3rd 2020 / Fellowship Life

Meet This Year’s Fellows: Molly Segal

Segal, a career audio storyteller, has never been content to simply conduct interviews from her desk.

On a cool May morning in the Canadian Rockies, Molly Segal awoke in a field research base camp outside Banff National Park. She was there accompanying a team of biologists on the lookout for grizzly bears. Over the next several days, the team took to the skies to search for a mountainside den under the thrum of helicopter blades, and drove to remote locations to check bear traps and rebait them with tempting pieces of elk. On her final morning, they sedated, radio-collared, and released a successfully captured bear. Through it all, Segal was there with her microphone, capturing every noise.

A career audio storyteller, Segal has never been content to simply conduct interviews from her desk. “I want people to be somewhere when they listen to the stories I produce,” she says. The kinds of stories she’s passionate about require her to go out into the world and construct a rich audio landscape. And that can mean hopping in a helicopter or two.

“I’ve always been a curious person,” Segal says. As a child in Toronto, she liked to write stories in her journal and frequent the Royal Ontario Museum on weekends. In high school, her curiosity led her to an editing role at the school paper. “Sometimes I guess you’re just drawn to things,” she says of her early love of stories. By the time Segal graduated from the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a combined honors degree in contemporary studies and French, she knew she wanted to pursue a degree in journalism.

Initially, Segal was convinced that she would go into magazine writing. But the degree required her to take at least one broadcast workshop. She tried radio, and instantly fell in love. “The radio stuff just sort of caught me off guard,” she says. “I really liked letting people be part of the storytelling in their own voice, and it felt so intimate.” She dropped her magazine workshop and picked up radio documentary instead.

Segal has worked in radio ever since, first as an associate producer and reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), then as a podcast producer and freelancer in Banff, Alberta, where she has lived and worked for the past four years.

Banff, which is nestled into the Canadian Rockies within Canada’s oldest National Park, “definitely changed the kind of stories I was drawn to” Segal says. Stories of human-wildlife conflict are everywhere. When Segal notices a pattern, like several wolf deaths reported in the local news, she’ll cold call anyone who might be able to tell her more and take her on site. “I’m just nosy I guess,” she says of her reporting style. It’s a style that has allowed her to create lush, beautiful, auditory landscapes that can, say, place the listener right in the midst of a hunting wolf pack.

As a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Segal hopes to delve into more human-wildlife conflict stories and revisit her interest in written journalism. “I’ve come in here with a set of things that I’m familiar with, a set of questions I have about various types of science or different research,” Segal says. “But I think what excites me more than access to what I know is access to what I don’t.”

This is the fifth in a series of profiles of the 2019-20 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.