Ed Yong (editor) - The best American science and nature writing 2021

Copyright 2021 by HarperCollins Publishers LLC

Introduction copyright 2021 by Ed Yong

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ISBN 978-0-358-40006-6 ( print ) ISSN 1530-1508 ( print )

ISBN 978-0-358-40152-0 ( ebook ) ISSN 2573-475X ( ebook )

Cover image Zen Rial / Getty Images
Yong Photograph Urzula Sotys
v1.0921

Long May They Reign by Nora Caplan-Bricker. First published in The Atavist, June 1, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Nora Caplan-Bricker. Reprinted by permission of Nora Caplan-Bricker.

Its Not Too Late to Save Black Lives by Julia Craven. First published in Slate, May 21, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Slate. Reprinted by permission of Slate.

What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change by Meehan Crist. First published in The New York Times, March 27, 2020. Copyright 2020 by The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

The Empty Space Where Normal Once Lived by Bathsheba Demuth. First published in The Atlantic, August 28, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Bathsheba Demuth. Reprinted by permission of the author and The Atlantic.

The Covid Drug Wars That Pitted Doctor vs. Doctor by Susan Dominus. First published in The New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2020. Copyright 2020 by The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

What Happened in Room 10? by Katie Engelhart. First published in California Sunday Magazine, August 19, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Katie Engelhart. Reprinted by permission of Katie Engelhart.

The Friendship and Love Hospital by Jiayang Fan. First published in The New Yorker, April 6, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Jiayang Fan. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream by Latria Graham. First published in Outside, September/October 2020. Copyright 2020 by Latria Graham. Reprinted by permission of Latria Graham.

The Soft Butch That Couldnt (Or: I Got Covid-19 in March and Never Got Better) by Heather Hogan. First published in Autostraddle, August 5, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Heather Hogan. Reprinted by permission of Heather Hogan.

The Unsung Heroine of Lichenology by Sabrina Imbler. First published in JSTOR Daily, September 26, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Sabrina Imbler. Reprinted by permission of Sabrina Imbler.

The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks by Brooke Jarvis. First published in The New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Brooke Jarvis. Reprinted by permission of Brooke Jarvis.

Fish Out of Water by Maya L. Kapoor. First published in High Country News, July 1, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Maya L. Kapoor. Reprinted by permission of Maya L. Kapoor.

Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk by Katy Kelleher. First published in The Paris Review Daily, August 19, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Katy Kelleher. Reprinted by permission of Katy Kelleher.

They Say Coronavirus Isnt Airbornebut Its Definitely Borne by Air by Roxanne Khamsi. First published in Wired, March 14, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Roxanne Khamsi. Reprinted by permission of Roxanne Khamsi.

SpaceX Is Taking over a Tiny Texas Neighborhood(originally titled Why SpaceX Wants a Tiny Texas Neighborhood So Badly)by Marina Koren. First published in The Atlantic, February 11, 2020. Copyright 2020 by The Atlantic. Reprinted by permission of The Atlantic.

The Difference Between Feeling Safe and Being Safe by Amanda Mull. First published in The Atlantic, October 26, 2020. Copyright 2020 by The Atlantic.Reprinted by permission of The Atlantic.

Rabbit Fever by Susan Orlean. First published in The New Yorker, June 29, 2020. Copyright 2020 by The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of Susan Orlean.

Im an ER Doctor in New York. None of Us Will Ever Be the Same by Helen Ouyang. First published in The New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Helen Ouyang. Reprinted by permission of Helen Ouyang.

This Is How We Live Now by Emily Raboteau. First published in New York Magazine/The Cut, January 9, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Emily Raboteau. Reprinted by permission of Emily Raboteau.

Cancel Earthworms by Julia Rosen. First published in The Atlantic, January 23, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Julia Rosen. Reprinted by permission of Julia Rosen.

Happiness Wont Save You by Jennifer Senior. First published in The New York Times, November 24, 2020. Copyright 2020 by The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

River of Time by Namwali Serpell. First published in The New York Times Magazine, July 22, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Namwali Serpell. Reprinted by permission of Namwali Serpell.

An Atlas of the Cosmos by Shannon Stirone. First published in Longreads, October 27, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Shannon Stirone. Reprinted by permission of Shannon Stirone.

A Toxic Secret Lurks in Deep Sea by Rosanna Xia. First published in The Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2020. Copyright 2020 by The Los Angeles Times. Used with permission.

The Last Children of Down Syndrome by Sarah Zhang. First published in The Atlantic, December 2020. Copyright 2020 by The Atlantic. Reprinted by permission of The Atlantic.

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic by Zeynep Tufekci. First published in The Atlantic, September 30, 2020. Copyright 2020 by Zeynep Tufekci. Reprinted by permission of Zeynep Tufekci.

O NE OF THE things I love about helping to edit this series is the breadth of stories I read and the breadth of stories we publish. But this year, of course, feels different. Alongside the essays about the cosmos and earthworms and our relationships with the outdoors are the essays about aerosol spread and exhausted physicians and insufficient recovery, trouble breathing and inequality and illness and death.

I can imagine futures where an unusual confluence of subject in this anthology reflects some thrilling advance or discoveryscience and nature writing from the year we discover intelligent life beyond Earth?and past years have had their own ripples, clusters of essays about animal extinctions, a yearly series of harrowing reporting on wildfires. But for 2020 this book is a portrait of a world upended, drawn in the work of writers who tried to make sense of it for us all.

This was a year when we desperately needed science writing, and also saw how science writing alone wasnt enough. As Ed Yong writes in his introduction, the Covid-19 pandemic was a crisis of science and nature and of so much morepolitics, social tensions, education, inequality. It was an omnicrisis, as Ed puts it, both because it touched on everything and because it was all-consuming. Any time Ive been aware that Im living through history has almost always been awful; 2020 was a whole year of that. But Im writing this with one dose of a vaccine in my body, and having last week hugged my mom for the first time in over a year. Those moments were historic too. Last year in my foreword I looked out onto the rest of 2020 with thoughts of worlds ending; today there is, if Im brave enough, some hope (and God I hope I havent jinxed it).