Bio

I'm a contributing editor at Discover magazine and the series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, an annual anthology published by Houghton Mifflin. For the past few years I've been living in a small town in northern New Mexico, trying to finish a book about the young Navajo men who developed a coded version of their language that was used by the Marine Corps in the Second World War.  Some years ago, before a stint on a commune in the Sierra Nevadas and long before I returned to college to study physics,  I worked on a barge in the North Sea and on oil tankers that plied the New England coast.