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Hello, subscribers. This is my latest post. Like much of my writing, it appeared first on my new substack (https://richardconniff.substack.com/) and I hope you will follow me there. Enjoy the read, and thank you for your support. Richard Conniff

American white pelicans on the wing (Photo: Claudio Contreras Koob) by Richard Conniff I’m watching a red-tailed hawk just now circling above the lower Connecticut River. It’s a placid, sunlit day, not like the mucky, half-drowned day Ted Hughes wrote about in his 1957 poem “The Hawk in the Rain.” But my hawk, like his, “Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye. His wings hold all creation…

The great primatologist Frans de Waal died last week, of stomach cancer, to the great sadness of his many admirers, myself among them.  His radically different view of primate behavior, and his gift for writing about it gracefully in a series of popular books, have placed him among the leaders of a quiet revolution in our ideas about the animal world and about ourselves. Harvard University…

In Sierra Leone, where recent public health campaigns are saving children’s (and parents’) lives. by Richard Conniff The PBS/Channel 13 show “The Open Mind” has just aired its interview with me about my book Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. You can take check out the interview here or if 28 minutes is too big a commitment, take a look at the transcript below HEFFNER: I am…

Here's my review for the Wall Street Journal of "Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived"

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal Megalodon lived. Past tense. The largest shark ever, and arguably the largest predator, went extinct 2.6 million or more years ago. And it has stayed that way. But Hollywood sequel makers will be pleased to know that megalodon still somehow manages to kill on average two people a year, according to Tim and Emma Flannery. More on that later. In “Big…

Edwin Chadwick, revolutionary thinker By Richard Conniff This article is excerpted and adapted from “Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion” (The MIT Press) It’s almost impossible now, thank God, to imagine the squalor of London and other supposedly civilized cities in the first half of the 19th century. As the rural poor moved to jobs in the factories of the Industrial…

“Smallpox still infected“: S. Ochmann and M. Roser. “Smallpox,” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. (2018): https://ourworldindata.org/smallpox [Online Resource] “Measles killed”: Roush and Murphy, “Historical Comparisons.” “Worldwide life expectancy”: Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Hannah Ritchie (2013) – “Life Expectancy”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from:…

A hawkmoth ready to uncurl that proboscis into a nectary (Photo: Anna Stöckl) by Richard Conniff I have mixed feelings about sphingid moths, sometimes called sphinx moths because the position their caterpillars commonly assume is said to resemble the Great Sphinx of Giza (but I don’t see it). I prefer to call them hummingbird moths, or just plain hawkmoths. On the one hand, I am deeply…

Roaring Brook Number 2, which deserves a better name. (Photo: Richard Conniff) by Richard Conniff It’s a dreary Sunday dawn here in Connecticut, 38 degrees (about 3 degrees Celsius), with rain pouring down, as it has been pouring down for much of the week. In a better world, at this time of year, that rain would have grown up to be snow and to lie for weeks two- or three-feet deep across the…

The Centaur of Tymfi on display in the Bruce Museum’s “Monsters and Mermaids” show. (Photo: Barnum Museum. Skeleton assembly commissioned by Bill Willers. Photographer: Sklmsta) By Richard Conniff Fakes are surprisingly common in the history of species discovery. For all the painstaking realism of his bird paintings, for instance, James John Audubon was a gleeful producer of cryptozoological…

By Richard Conniff/The New York Times There was a time not so long ago when preventing epidemic disease was a cause ordinary people embraced and celebrated. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Americans to join the fight against polio, for instance, he reported that envelopes containing “dimes and quarters and even dollar bills” arrived by the truckload at the White House, “from…

Richard Conniff is an award-winning nonfiction writer. He specializes in the topics of human and animal behavior, with his work appearing in the New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and National Geographic, among others. Below, Richard shares five key insights from his new book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion. Listen to the audio version—read by Richard himself—in the…

Community conservancies have thrived in part by protecting endangered black rhinos (Photo: Getty) by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360 Namibia has always seemed to me to be a wondrous country, and not just for its paradoxical richness of life in a sparse, arid habitat. Its Khoisan people have long regarded themselves as Earth’s oldest humans. (Recent genetic evidence indicates that they may…

by Richard Conniff/Yale Alumni Magazine This story is a bit far afield for this site, and its normal focus on science and the natural world. But sometimes, hey, you need a break. (And, yes, Senator, I am now and for several decades have been a card-carrying member of the left-wing Ivy League conspiracy.) It was a perfect autumn afternoon in 1969, the beginning of my first year at Yale. The…

Today’s pub day for my new book “Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion” (MIT Press). Good stories need good readers, and I could definitely use your help to spread the word. Below are some endorsements for the book–including the great defender of vaccine science Peter Hotez, MD, which turned up Sunday on Twitter. Please feel free to repeat in whole or in pieces! And if you get…

Her name was Isabel Morgan (1911–1996). She was a virologist at Johns Hopkins University. And in 1947, she demonstrated the first effective polio immunization in rhesus monkeys. Morgan had devised a formalin-inactivated vaccine, at a time when most polio researchers believed such a vaccine could not possibly work. “She converted us and that was quite a feat,” one of her many male colleagues…

On the Origin of a Theory

by Richard Conniff This is an excerpt from my book The Species Seekers, and I am publishing it here today to honor the 200th birthday of Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of evolutionary theory. Alfred Russel Wallace Leafing through the mail at his home outside London one June day 150 years ago, Charles Darwin came across an envelope sent from an island in what is now part of Indonesia. The…

ENDING EPIDEMICS: NOTES (IN DEVELOPMENT)

In my latest book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion, due out in April 2023, I promised to supply more detailed endnotes on line. I’m up to chapter 11, and continuing to add. Here’s what I’ve got so far, with URLs where possible: PREFACE: THE HEALING p. ix “Some crematories”: A. Feuer and W.K. Rashbaum. “‘We Ran Out of Space’: Bodies Pile Up as N.Y. Struggles to Bury Its…