Episode 107: Kelly and Zach Weinersmith on How to Write a Debunking Book That's Upbeat and Funny

Emerging Form

When Kelly and Zach Weinersmith proposed a book on colonizing Mars, they had no idea that halfway through their research they’d change their position. Their title says it all: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? What happens when two people who eschew conflict find themselves in a position of dashing people’s dreams about space? In this light-hearted episode we talk about their research process, how they organized crazy amounts of information, their collaborative processes, negotiating critique with each other, how to make hard science more accessible and palatable to the public and how humor helps everything.

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith received her PhD in Ecology at the University of California Davis, and is an adjunct faculty member in the BioSciences Department at Rice University. Kelly studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts, and her research has been featured in The Atlantic, National Geographic, BBC World, Science, and Nature. With her husband, Zach Weinersmith she wrote Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, was a New York Times Bestseller.

and Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist behind the popular geek webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and he illustrated the New York Times-bestselling Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. His work has been featured by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday and many others. Zach and Kelly live in Virginia with their children.

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