‘Best American Science Writing 2011’ Now Out

<a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062091246">Ecco, Paperback, 9780062091246, 352pp</a>.

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The Best American Science Writing 2011 (HarperCollins/Ecco Press) is out.

I’m honored to say that my Mother Jones article, BP’s Deep Secrets, is one of ten pieces chosen for the volume. Of it, one reviewer wrote:

“‘Deep Secrets’ by Julia Whitty: An examination of the recent oil spill near Louisiana. This was my personal favorite. What we didn’t know about the gulf environment before the oil spill we may never know if the environment’s destroyed.”

This year’s edition is edited by Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), her father, the poet and essayist Floyd Skloot, and Jesse Cohen.

Support your local indie bookstore and a science writer or two and buy a copy. Or two. Thanks!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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