Photo: Dennis Engel
Discover Magazine’s blog has published an interesting piece “On the origin of science writers”, in which prominent science writers explain why they’ve started writing about science. Among these writers are Jonah Lehrer and Steve Silberman, whose texts have been published recently by D/A Magazine.
Steve Silberman writes:
I loved language. Before I was even old enough to talk, my late father taught me to love words by reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses” aloud while carrying me on his shoulders. As an English professor at a state college in New Jersey, he showed generations of inner-city students how to see their own struggles reflected in the travails of Dickens’ textile workers and the crew of Melville’s “Pequod.” […]
When I was 19, between semesters at Oberlin College, I spent a summer studying with Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other writers at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. In his own way, Ginsberg was a journalist, working for planet Earth. He amassed vast file-cabinets of carefully annotated data on subjects of interest, such as CIA-sponsored heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia. (Those files are now housed in a special collection at Stanford University.) One day in class Ginsberg said, “Poetry is the realization of the magnificence of the actual.” That remark has stuck with me. It could also be said about science.
Silberman, like most of the other writers, share an inquisitive mind and a fascination by the universe and its challenges ― like most scientists, artists, and most human beings. As Jonah Lehrer reminds us, today we need a movement “that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement—perhaps a fourth culture—is that neither culture can exist by itself.”
Read more on Discover Magazine’s blog.
