Barbara Kiser on Muck Rack

Barbara Kiser

As seen in: Medium, Nature, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Zócalo Public Square, Issues in Science and Technology, The London Magazine

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Barbara Kiser’s Biography

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I've edited, restructured, written and proofread my way across a range of formats and topics. And I have worked in sectors from science journalism (Nature and New Scientist) to the UN system and NGOs.

I was Nature's commissioning editor for books and arts for a decade while writing the weekly Books in Brief column and running the blog A View from the Bridge. In May 2020 I moved on to freelance and consultancy work, and have since published pieces in The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Review …

Barbara Kiser’s Journalist Portfolio

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Books at budtime: spring reading

Books at budtime: spring reading

Budding, rising, rooting — the rush hour of life is on with the northern hemisphere’s tilt towards the long d…

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Review of Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing

Review of Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing

What are nature and culture on a planet we have exhaustively mapped and immeasurably changed? How are we ours…

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Review of four books on the science and culture of smell

Review of four books on the science and culture of smell

Sometimes we seem to be all ears and eyes. Language is drenched in the audiovisual: we feel blue, admire visi…

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Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith's Metazoa

Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith's Metazoa

Life undersea has a mesmerizing strangeness, from glass sponges-lacy matrices draped with cellular nets-to ro…

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Decoding the city: Eleanor Clark and Georgina Masson in Rome

Decoding the city: Eleanor Clark and Georgina Masson in Rome

In 1983, I moved to Rome. My timing was a little odd. Italy was still mired in the anni di piombo - the 'year…

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Review of Ben Ehrenreich's Desert Notebooks and Bradley Garrett's Bunker

Review of Ben Ehrenreich's Desert Notebooks and Bradley Garrett's Bunker

If this year has a zeitgeist, it's collapse - of ecosystems, government norms, pandemic preparedness, and qui…

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Articles

At play in the cosmos: Isamu Noguchi

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By Barbara Kiser
| Medium
"I like to think that when you get to the furthest point of technology, when you get to outer space, what do you find to bring back? Rocks!" Isamu Noguchi's playful remark to the art critic Calvin Tomkins in 1980 flips a space-age feat on its head. Finding something so earthly on the Moon is a reminder of our entanglement with the cosmos -John Muir's idea that whenever you single something out, you find it "hitched to everything else in the Universe".
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The Life Arboreal

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By Barbara Kiser
| Los Angeles Review of Books
NOVEMBER 2, 2021 I GREW UP in the company of trees. Northeast of Duluth on the Gunflint Trail, I’d stare into a soughing twilight of massed pines, tamarack, cedar — the boreal forest, Earth’s largest biome. Now, in London, I spend time with a pedunculate oak higher than a house and a grove of hornbeams like dancers frozen in mid-twist. In our doom-scrolling, pandemic-ravaged era, these encounters ground me like little else. Our affinity for trees is deeply ingrained, of course.
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Four Books on the Science and Sensation of Smell

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By Barbara Kiser, Matthew CobbOxford, Matthew Cobb, A. S. Barwich
| Issues in Science and Technology
By Barbara Kiser Barbara Kiser explores the world of smell through four books—written by an olfaction researcher, a philosopher, a food science writer, and a cultural historian. Review of Smell: A Very Short Introduction By Matthew Cobb Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020, 168 pp. Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind By A. S. Barwich Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020, 384 pp.
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