Background for our video visit with Tom Hayden

Our guest in next week's class will be the freelance science journalist Tom Hayden (not to be confused with the 60's era political activist and former husband to Jane Fonda).  I met Tom in 1993 as a grad student in the marine biology program at USC.  Sometime around year three of our program Tom got a summer internship as a science writer for Newsweek magazine in New York City and never turned back.  In addition to being a staff writer at Newsweek, he has worked at U.S. News & World Report and has written freelance for Wired, Nature, The Washington Post and National Geographic (among others).  He is also the author of two books, including the recent Sex and War.

Next week's class is a great opportunity for us to learn first hand about science communication from someone who does it professionally.  To get ready, I would like you to read some of Tom's work, and take notes on questions that you might like to ask about these specific articles and science writing/communication in general.  I hope that we can get a good discussions going.

Read the following before next week's class:

• A piece from 2002 on modern research in evolution
• A more recent piece on evolution from 2009
• An article from 2003 on the state of marine fisheries

Recently Tom has been working on more multimedia pieces that involved collaborations with four to eight other writers and editors:

• Earth pulse at National Geographic
• The future of food at Wired magazine