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JOURNALIST, AUTHOR, SCIENCE WRITER

I'm a freelance journalist and the author of nine books, most recently TWENTYSOMETHING: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? which I co-wrote with my daughter, Samantha Henig. It was named by Kirkus as one of the 30 "Most Anticipated" nonfiction books of Fall 2012.

My other books include Pandora’s Baby, about the early days of in vitro fertilization research, the controversy surrounding the creation of the world's first test tube baby, and the ways in which that controversy sounds a lot like the debates now taking place about reproductive options like designer babies and human cloning. The book was the focus of a television documentary that aired on American Experience on PBS in the fall of 2006. The book before that, The Monk in the Garden, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I've won some other nice awards, too: a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, two Science in Society awards from the National Association of Science Writers, and a career achievement award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

 

I'm a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and I also write magazine articles for National Geographic and The Atlantic, where I have an occasional web column about grandparenting. As an adjunct professor at the NYU journalism school, I teach a basic reporting and writing workshop, as well as a summer class in journalism ethics, to graduate students in the school's Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. And I'm thinking about my next book project -- which sometimes involves spending too much time on Twitter and calling it research.

As challenging as it is, freelance writing makes for a lonely life. Luckily, my husband Jeff and I live in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York, an odd blend of quiet and lively, college town and gigantic city. In a place like this, other people, including other writers, are always right outside the door -- at least they were before the pandemic, and that's slowly becoming true again now.