Ep. 112: Mary Roach

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

How do you get people to read about science who don't think they're interested in science? You entertain people, you fascinate them-- ultimately you make them care."

Beloved nature and science writer Mary Roach is here with new book in hand called Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology. Daniel and Mary also discuss many personal issues-- how did Mary get into science writing in the first place? How does music contribute to her ability to write? How can science and the humanities help each other, coexist in a better way?

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Mary Roach is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her new book FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law, debuts in September 2021. Mary's books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, SPOOK, was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. She was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and serves as an advisor for Orion and Undark magazines. She has been a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.