Poured Over: Ed Yong on An Immense World

“I sort of figured that, having been interested in science from as long as I can remember, I would be a PhD student, and make a career for myself and research. And it turned out that the one hitch with that plan was that I am catastrophically bad at doing actual research. I was the world’s worst graduate student….So instead, I thought that I would find a different purpose and better joy in talking and writing about science, which is what I did. That nourishes my soul much more; I get to learn about a lot of really cool things.” An Immense World is the delightful new book from The Atlantic staff writer Ed Yong, and he joins us on the show to talk about meeting animals on their own terms, the connection between Jane Austen and mice, peacocks and The Bee Gees; how hearing is also a kind of touch and how deer-like creatures transformed into whales; his pandemic puppy and his literary inspirations (including Mary Roach) and much more, with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.

Featured Books:

An Immense World by Ed Yong

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong

How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler

H is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. You can also find video editions of Poured Over on our YouTube channel.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’m so excited that Ed Yong is here. He writes about the natural world with this incredible sense of wonder and joy and discovery. And let’s face it, discovery is key for writers for booksellers for readers. The new book is An Immense World. And the subtitle is How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. And Edie is taking time out of his busy schedule to join us today. And we’re so totally stoked about this because this book is amazing. Dude, how did you turn out to be a science writer? How did we get here?

Ed Yong: I’ve always been interested in science. And that sort of infectious joy, which you’re reading into the book was in my head, from, as long as I can remember, I especially loved animals, you know, I was the kid who would insist on going to the zoo all the time. And I like watching nature documentaries, reading nature books. And you know, that carried me through all of my education, I sort of figured that, having been interested in science from as all as long as I can remember, I would do it like I would be a PhD student, and like, make a career for myself and research. And it turned out that the the one hitch with that plan was that I am catastrophically bad at doing actual research, I was the world’s worst graduate student. And I recognize that quite early on. So instead, I thought that I would find a different purpose and better joy in talking and writing about science, which is what I did, that nourishes my soul much more, I get to learn about a lot of really cool things. I’ve been a science writer since for about, you know, 15 plus years. And this is my second book. But it’s a topic that I have deeply loved for a long time, thinking about how other animals think and sense. You know, it just feels like the good stuff. The idea of this book came from my wife, Liz, who was also a wannabe PhD student who decided to forge a career in communication instead. But for the time she was doing work, she has studied the visual systems of coral reef fish, so how some of the most colorful creatures in the world see and perceive color around them. In many ways, this book is her gift to me of the idea was her gift to me, and the book itself is my gift to her.

B&N: Okay, you also start by teaching us all a little German. Can we talk about this for a second, because I had never heard this word until I started reading your book. And it does matter a lot in the context of what you’re doing.

EY: It’s sort of the the central underpinning idea of a whole book. So I do not speak German. And so I will probably mangle the pronunciation of umwelt. But that’s my best stab. And it was pioneered by a man whose name I will also Mangle, Jakob von Uexkül, pioneered this term in the early 20th century. And it ostensibly means environment in German, but he used it in a very specific way, he wasn’t talking about the environment as just like the physical surroundings of an animal, but specifically the part of those surroundings that the animal can perceive the unique set of sights and smells, and textures and sounds that that creature can tune into. But other creatures who might occupy the same physical space might not have any awareness of so you know, as an example, humans can see colors ranging from red to violence, we can’t see ultraviolet, but most other animals with color vision can like a bee can. And to a bee, a sunflower isn’t just uniform yellow, it has like an ultraviolet bull’s eye in its middle, the songbirds outside my window can sense the magnetic field of the planet, you know, a sharp consensus, the electric fields produced by its prey, both things that that we can’t sense. So every animal has this perceptual bubble, this unique sense set of sensory information. That is its world, and its alone. And that is just a tiny sliver of all there is to say.

B&N: There’s something that you say in the introduction that I really appreciate, and I’m going to quote you for a second. This is a book not about superiority, but also about diversity. This is a book about animals as animals. Animals are not just standards for humans are fodder for brainstorming sessions. They have worth in themselves and I think that’s a really important point to make that you are literally meeting a lot of creatures on their own terms, and that includes sticking your hand into a lot of tanks where I’m like, Dude, this this does not bode well.

EY: Right, right. That’s a very bad idea. Yes, right. What have I done in the book I got? I got shocked by an electric fish. I got punched by a mantis shrimp. I was trapped traipsing around California searching for rattlesnakes. are trying to head towards rattlesnakes, which is the opposite direction. Most people try and go in the book is about trying to meet animals on their own terms. The I think that when we think about the senses of other creatures, there’s two mistakes we make. One is to assume that like humans have this special place in the the hierarchy of nature that we are, you know, dominant or better than other creatures around us. But the other is to only appreciate animals when they break that rule. So, with the senses, there’s a lot of talk about like, six senses and super senses. So, you know, animals are really cool when like, a shark and smell blood from miles away, or, or an eagle has sharper eyes than us, they are only worth thinking about when they surpass our already lofty standards. And one of the crucial arguments in the book is that that’s the wrong way of thinking about it at the center has always come with tradeoffs, nothing is good at everything. So some, you know, there are things that we’re good at, we have very sharp eyes, they’re very sensitive fingertips. But in many ways, we’re substantially worse than other creatures. But it’s not just ones that surpass us that matter. Scientists often study the ways animals sense for a few reasons, like some of them are interested in, in finding ways of improving our own tech, the military has funded a lot of research on dolphins, because dolphin sonar teaches us how to make our sonar better. And then some people study animals as sort of proxies for us as these model organisms whose interesting biology gives us hints about our own biology. And, you know, fairplay to both of those groups of people. But An Immense World is not about either of those things. It’s about appreciating animals for themselves, because that alone is worth doing. And because that gives us a wider and more wondrous sense of our own world and our place in it.

B&N: Well, also, I’m a city dweller, I’m a city person, I don’t ever want to meet a bear on a pet. I have a friend who grew up in Alaska, she’s got some stories about meeting bears, right? I don’t ever want to meet a bear. I’m good friends. I learned a lot reading your book, but I’m pretty sure I’m smarter now that I finished. Because it’s the level of detail. And again, I know I keep coming back to the joy but it is really kind of great the way you dig in with all of this. But, you know, we’re a book podcast and we’re a bookstore. And I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the Jane Austen and mice piece story. If you have anything to do with books, you have to find a way to work Jane Austen in there, but you did it in a really grand way.

EY: For sure. Right. The Jane Austen connection is mice have a pheromone that’s that’s present nippy. And the pheromone is a sexual attractant. And it’s named Dassin after Mr. Darcy obviously, so you know, love, love a good literary reference, especially love when the Literary Reference becomes technical jargon. You know, here is Dassin forevermore part of the scientific literature. I think I wanted to make sure that you know, the book didn’t just feel like a quote unquote science book that you know, it has sure it goes into the weeds, you know, talks about it gives you like rich detail that helps you understand these things. But it’s also I hope, you know, lyrical and beautiful, I think that the senses, there’s just this topic, umwelt, how other animals perceive. It’s, it’s so rich, it mattered to me a lot that the pros should live up to the high standard, the promise of the topic sets. I wanted people to have this like profound sense of joy. I wanted them to feel like the world feels wider and an even familiar things feel like newly unfamiliar and I sort of wanted people to have this sense of like every page, there’s a moment where you just sort of put the book down and just stare out your window. With this sort of newfound appreciation I’ve joked before that I wanted the boat to turn people into the like best slash worst dinner guests of all time. That you know, you were constantly want to like tell people about these these cool things that you learned, what I’m asking people to do and what I’ve tried to do in the book of trying to appreciate the sensory worlds of other creatures, that is actually impossible. You know, you can always try science gets us a long way. A book like this gets us further but there’s always going to be a separation or gulf between what’s existing in our head and what exists in another creatures head. And the latter is always a little unknowable to jump that can casm, you need feats of imagination of I think the kinds of only like a book can really, really get started getting at. And there’s something beautiful about crying really hard at a task that you know, you won’t fully succeed, but you’re going to give it a go anyway. And that’s how this thinking about the senses other than, you know, the sensory worlds of other animals feels like to me.

B&N: I’m gonna go back to your dinner party comment for a second because I’m not sure I can eat scallops the same way ever again. So in the section you have called Light, one of the creatures you’re talking about are scallops, and I did not know that they have many, many, many. I mean, obviously, the scallop that you eat is the muscle. But yeah, can we talk about the eyes for a second? Freaking me out.

EY: Wild, right. So yeah, the little, you know, the little hockey puck of delicious fish that’s on your plate and seared in butter is just one of the muscles and the whole animal has the beautiful shell that I think people can sort of imagine. But inside that shell is a whole creature, and on the rim of that shell, are eyes, sometimes dozens, maybe you know a couple of 100 in some species. In some scallops, the eyes are genuinely beautiful. They look like little almost like Christmas ornaments. Some of them are like electric blue with small dots in the middle. So firstly, a scallop can look at you. That’s weird. That’s that’s a little unsettling for an animal that I think some people don’t even realize are animals. What does a scallop see? And why does it need so many eyes? The weird thing about scallop vision is that the eyes are actually pretty good. Like for, for an animal that simple, like the optics or quality of the eyes are like, surprisingly high. But the animal’s brain is incredibly simple. So what is doing with all the information in the eyes, like in the book, I have this analogy of like, imagine the scallop is a security guard, and it’s got a bank of monitors in front of it. And each of those monitors is connected to a state of the art camera. And that’s the that’s the eyes. So it’s getting all this information from all this like very, very sophisticated tech. But what it sees on the monitor is not the image that the eye sees, it’s probably just like, you know, like maybe green, if it’s bots, or if the eyes spotted something interesting, or like black, if nothing. It’s the simplest possible information. And that’s what the brain is capable of processing. But that’s really weird. Because when we think about vision, so you know, I’m looking at you now I can see my laptop, I can see the room, I have a scene playing out in front of me, the scallop almost certainly doesn’t have that. It has some awareness of where around it as something interesting is happening because the eyes are very good. But I don’t think it has scenes playing out in its head. I didn’t know there’s like a movie of the world that exists in the scallop’s brain. And just that idea of seeing without scenes is so different to what we do. And so hard to imagine that I think it ends up being kind of cool. You know, you can you sort of sit there for a while having to work at thinking about this, like the scientist I spoke to who studied these creatures was like, I never imagined like spending so much of our life thinking about what the scallop sees. I think it’s beautiful and challenging and kind of wonderful.

B&N: Can we just talk about how you sit down and map out a book like this, because you’re talking about everything from mosquitoes and ants, and some worms that I don’t ever want to meet to bears, and bats and owls and elephants. And we’re just doing a wide range because they all fit into obviously, this larger world. But you’ve got to organize all of this.

EY: From the very start. Within the moment, I thought I was going to do this book, because it felt obvious that I was going to structure it around different centers. And it allows me to talk about what each sensor does well, and what kinds of things it’s useful for. And that might be a weird thing to think about. Like, obviously, we have the sensors we have, we kind of think they’re great. But in most cases, there are exceptions like there are animals that don’t see, there are animals that don’t hear, there’s actually quite a lot of animals that don’t hear. So things like sound and like are not like universally useful. And we then have to think like what actually are those stimuli good for like why would you want to sense those things and how do animals use that? So by thought talking about the different centers it as an individual chapters, we sort of get to that, that kind of deeper philosophical question of why I have seen other people write about the senses in, in the traditional five buckets. And the reason we think about the five senses as Aristotle, that’s his classification scheme, and we sort of embraced it over time. But it it, there are problems with it. Firstly, it misses out some senses that even we have so misses out the internal ones like proprioception, which is how I know where my arms and legs are, even though I’m looking at the camera right now ignores the fact that in some creatures, many of the senses that we think of as being separate are probably fused together. Like for an octopus, it’s suckers are lined with both taste and touch sensors. And you know, as far as I know, an octopus might have just one sense of taste touch, it might feel a flavor, or it might know the texture, might know the texture of a flavor, it might have the taste of a shape. And then there are the senses that we don’t have. So being able to send to electric fields, and magnetic fields. And then there are things that I think sometimes get ignored in talking about the sensors, I have a whole chapter on pain. I have a chapter on heat, like how we think about temperature, and I really wanted to get at those things to show people that. Again, it’s that defamiliarization thing that this this rubric that we’ve all been taught and grown up with, you know, there are five senses, even for humans is a little bit limiting and certainly in terms of the natural world is is extremely limiting. And if that that that feeling of like I’m expecting five chapters, actually there are 12 is part of the books ability to capture like something something new about this topic.

B&N: Yeah. Which includes a chapter called Contact and Flow. And peacocks. And soundtracks.

EY: Okay. I’m gonna say the peacock thing. So this was actually part of a structural challenge within the book. So very quickly, the peacocks if you think of peacocks, what do you think about?

B&N: They’re mean. There are no mean.

EY: That’s okay. That’s not that wasn’t the answer I was looking for also totally fair. They’re mean they’re very loud. But you know, they have the tail, the best, gaudy, flamboyant of this tail. But they also have a crest right? They have some sticky up feathers on the head that most people just ignore it. Because why would you look at the price feathers when you have the tail. Turns out that the crust feathers vibrate at exactly the same frequent resonant frequency as the tail shapes where the male displays to male fans out its tail shakes the tail, it creates vibrations in the air, and those exact vibrations make the crust feathers shake. So it seems that when a peacock is watching another peacock display, it’s not just seeing the display, it’s also feeling it in its head. I love that the scientists who studied this for for a control stimulus for something that isn’t a recording of a meal of peacock display, they used the Bee Gees. They didn’t only use the Bee Gees, they wanted me to be very clear about that. They tried a number of other musical stimuli, but Staying Alive by the Bee Gees was one of them. There’s a few little, little moments in the book where people have actually used popular songs in their experiments. But I’ll leave I’ll leave you to find those out for yourself. This was an open question like, where do I put that story? Is that hearing? Is it touch? It’s sort of a bit of both. There’s a kind of chapter and a half that bridges the divide between those things. Because with humans by we’re used to thinking of touch as a thing of direct contact. But for a lot of animals touch operates at a distance like a fish consents the current created by the fish since swimming around it, a cricket consents the air currents created by a spider charging at it. So when you start thinking about that, touch becomes actually a much wider and weirder sense than what we have and trying to figure out how to structure on the book was was a challenge. But you know, when you actually get it, you’ll see like how how I’ve tried to address it.

B&N: And also you say that hearing is most closely related to touch. I need you to explain that because I think I understand what how that happens and where that comes from. But the other part of my brain is saying what?

EY: In the way we hear, we have all this like stuff on the side of our heads and it takes sound waves which are waves of pressure in the air, and it converts that stimulus into something that deflects tiny little hair cells in our inner ear. So ultimately, it’s kind of touch right? It’s what touch is is a mechanical sense something that translates a physical movement in the world into a nervous signal that our brains can interpret what we typically think of as touch, like that’s achieved by pressing a finger against an object or having something touch or make contact with our skin, that mechanical force turns into nerve a signal. But that’s also what hearing is, it’s about translating those pressure waves in the air into this, the stimulus that that deflects a little hair inside our ears, there’s sort of a shared evolutionary history to that, like the, the lateral line that fishes used to send water currents are related to those hair cells in our ears. And the cells that electric fish used to send electric fields that they and other fish generate. They’re also related, right? So there’s a thread of connectedness that links all the senses that actually we think of as being incredibly different. But they’re all connected by touch, hearing, the electric sense. They’re of a kind and distinct from things like smell, and, and taste and vision.

B&N: And we don’t ultimately know either, if animals are necessarily talking to each other, or using their senses to navigate through their space. I mean, you sort of alluded to this with scallops. And there are many, many, many eyes oof, I’m not sure I’m ever gonna get over that. But at the same time, you know, we know whales sing, we know dolphins communicate with each other, there are certain things we do know, but because we are not in the bodies of these creatures, we can’t always know what they’re up to. So how to you, as the journalist figure out what part of the story you follow?

EY: Some of the protagonist of the book, like the main characters, and by that, I mean, either the scientists who I met or the animals who I focused on, were very obvious from the start, like, I know about this, this, this topic, I’ve been writing about it for a while. So I knew that I wanted to include like things that probably most people have never heard of. Scallops, people have heard of them, but didn’t know their eyes. You know, there are mantis shrimps in the books and star nosed moles, like weirdos, you know, animals that probably have never heard of and completely reasonably so. I can take you as far as the science goes. And you know, maybe a little bit beyond that. Some of it comes from interviewing the scientists who work in this field, because the papers that they write, but what in the scientific literature doesn’t really have those imaginative feats, right? It’s just the data. There you have it. But the people who study these animals, they’ve all thought about this question, you know, what is it? What is it? What is this creature who I work with all the time thinking what is it like to be a bat or a mantis shrimp or whatever. So when you ask them, like, just put aside like the, you know, the academic shell, like all the trappings of academia, and just go nuts, like, go on a little speculative journey with me, like, tell me what you’re imagining. They always have answers. And they’re great answers. And I think that gets at some of the weirdness in this topic that that’s hard to think about. So you talked about the the difficulty in sometimes working out whether animal is like sensing or communicating. So one really good example about this, like, there are fish that generate their own electricity, liquid electric field. And they sense the obstacles around them by looking at how those obstacles change the shape of those fields, whether they’re conductive, like another fish, or insulating like a rock. That’s incredible in its own right. But it gets weirder when you know when you realize that those fields that they produce are also the means by which they communicate with other electric fish. So they produce electricity, they’re using it as a means of navigation, but also as a way of talking. But that means that if one changes, so does the other so when electric fish have fights, sometimes one will signal like peace, you know, I’m done by cutting out its electric field by just you know, being silent, electrically silenced for a while. But that’s not only a peace offering, that also shuts down its awareness of its surroundings. It’s as if, like, whenever I tried to like make up with a friend of mine Arroway I had to like plug my ears and close my eyes. And and that, you know, just another one of these like, weird ways, like weird things that these animals are doing that I think is not obvious, but that really does sort of make you think about how to like interpret their behavior.

B&N: You talk about whales having started as the deer like creature 50 million years before they walked in. How did I miss that? Was I not paying attention in the fourth grade? I mean, is this new information? What do you mean? Well started with legs on the ground, like and then when and what?

EY: Right, right, right, right. Maybe you were just like not paying attention 50 million years ago, while all this was happening, you just just really missed it. Yeah, so, a long time ago, you had a small daylight creature that spent more and more of its time in water and like its descendants became more and more adapted the water, it lost the legs and legs became floaters. And, that’s how we have whales. It’s actually what like, it’s, it’s one of the best documented of these like crazy evolutionary transitions we have, we have a lot of fossils showing like all the intermediate steps along the way. And one thing I love is that, at some point during the process, they went down to very different routes in terms of their senses. So you have one route that went like big and deep. So their hearing became tuned to low frequencies, their bodies ballooned in size. And now you have things like blue and humpback whales, that produce these incredibly low frequency calls that could theoretically like carry across an entire ocean. Maybe they hear over not quite those distances, but like, certainly, immense distances, which makes you think, if you see a single blue whale, swimming in the sea, is that whale alone, because it can probably hear a lot of other whales, very far away from it. And its own corals can probably be heard by other whales far away from it. So like, what actually counts as a pod of whales? Do you need to see multiple whales, as a human like next to each other for that to count as a group, or can a group of very disparate whales count as a pod, you have another group of whales that went in the opposite direction, they went small and high. So they dolphins and their relatives produce these high pitched calls, and they echolocate. They, they navigate the world by by listening out for the rebounding echoes of their own calls. And they can do all sorts of crazy things with that they you know, they can probably use the echolocation a bit like an MRI scanner, they can see like the bones inside you they can see the swim bladders in the fish that they hunt, dogs can probably tell apart different species of fish by the shape of it swim bladder, you don’t look at a deer. And think, I think I think I know how this is going to end up in in a you know, a few dozen million years.

B&N: Nope, nope, no idea until I read it in your book. But it does bring me to a larger point too. I mean, creatures evolve. Evolution is a thing. It is real, it is continual. And science also evolves. And we’re living in a moment in world history where that particular concept seems to be hard for a lot of folks. And that is something you bring up in the book, you’re saying, you know, there are moments where science is sort of decided, here we are in this point, and then they find out we’re wrong. And that is sort of the nature of that discovery. In that investigation, though, because you are doing the experiments, you’re chasing the information, you’re chasing the creatures, in some cases, did you have any moments where you were kind of like, oh, no, that’s gotta go. Because that’s just been disproven completely. And we just can’t use that anymore.

EY: So the chapter on sensing magnetic fields get out this other topic, because that is a very difficult sense to study, we don’t really have an intuitive understanding of it. We don’t know what the organ is that text magnetic fields and the animals that can do that. And there are a lot of discoveries that come out, and then are rapidly disproven, also, partly because there’s a lot of interest here. And there’s a lot of competition and competition sometimes fuels spotty work, we understand that science is not this, like caricatured neutral force of discovery that is sometimes painted as it’s not as if like, scientists are these like, perfect empirical, objective beings, that can, you know, look at the world through this like completely neutral lens. Like the way they interpret their results is profoundly influenced by the kinds of experiments that they design, which is influenced by the kinds of questions that they think to ask, which are influenced by their imaginations, their culture, the values of the time. And yeah, as you say, there are so many instances where people have based on how they thought the senses work like that, whether it’s like the era’s tilian, five senses thing or something else. They had very firm ideas about how animals worked, and they completely ignored really obvious glaring clues about things that work differently. And it took people who thought a little bit outside the box and who had came at it from it from a different point of view, to see past that. And I think all of that makes clear that science is this inherently social enterprise, like it really does depend on the ways of thinking of the people who get to do it. You know, at the start of this, we talked about how the book is about diversity, not superiority. And you know, I meant that in terms of diversity of the senses. But I also mean that in terms of diversity of researchers, it’s why encouraging as broad range of people as possible to be scientists, is so important to me at this point, very quickly, at the start of the book about how a lot of people who study the senses have, like, you know, weird sensory things themselves, you know, they have quirks of their neurology that that some people might describe as disorders and other people, I think, more rightly just described as variation. And that helps him to see like the ways in which the creature they’re looking at it might also be atypical and interesting.

B&N: And this book also ended up taking you a little bit longer than you’d planned. He had been on book leave in early 2020. And then suddenly, you were asked to come back to the Atlantic to lead their COVID pandemic coverage and subsequently won a Pulitzer. So congratulations. And I’ve read all of those articles. And stayed calm.

EY: That’s great. That was the intended effect. It was very jarring. It was sad having to put down the book because I was having so much fun with it. It was jarring going back into it like Firstly, it was necessary, I think, you know, in I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say the book saved me a bit. Pandemic reporting is grueling and horrible and often incredibly tragic. So to switch gears and, and embrace something that is so joyful and wondrous, after nine months of quite intense work and burnout was, was very much a salve. I have joked before, right, like, for most people, book writing is not a famously rejuvenating activity, you know, no one thinks like, I will heal by writing a book. And yet it, it very much felt like that, for me, it was restorative and helpful, but the transition moment was was very jarring. And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the feats of imagination required to do this work, you know, to, it helps to have consistent periods of time when you’re really thinking about this, where you’re deep in this in this mindset and leaving it at having to go back very hard. I did as when I came back to it for round two, I did discover that I had basically plotted out an entire chapter and completely organized it and wrote like, very, very detailed notes to myself, so that I completely forgotten about. So January 2021, Ed was just like, enormously grateful to February 2020 Ed who had really like, done him a solid. And it turned out that, so a lot of my writing in the pandemic, is, is predicated on this idea that part of the problem we faced is sort of catastrophic lack of empathy with each other, like, a failure to recognize the experiences of other people. And this book is about radical acts of empathy. It’s about trying to, to get in the minds of, you know, not just other people, but entirely entirely different species. So I’m not sure there was like a specific idea that threaded its way through, but like having that theme be a constant of the work and made it a little less jarring, like switching back and forth between those two things. And then I think there was also just like, the, the practical aspect of it, like I wrote, I don’t even know how many like back to back mammoth, like many 1000s of word features on the pandemic, you know, between March and December of 2020. And, like, long form writing, I think is like a muscle, you know, you do it enough times, you become like, jacked. And that’s how I felt going into the second half of the book. You know, I felt like I had run like, a dozen marathons in a row already. So what was a few more, it was telling to me that like, the second half of the book, took so much less time to write than the first half of it, because I dunno, like this really grueling intensive, like Ironman writing workout in the middle of it.

B&N: Yeah. And something you said in an earlier interview that I really loved was that magazine writing is about the past and the future. Newspapers are about the present. And to that I would add books are about the context and you have delivered a really fun smart way to experience context. The thing that I really appreciate about this book is the narrative moves the sentences or beautiful, and I was much smarter at the end of it. Plus you have a corgi named Typo.

EY: I do. Yeah, a very, very strong writer name I think. Yep, he’s typo. That was another there was another reason why having a bit of a break was was good. Like we got Typo, just as I started going to the second phase of book leave. If people tend to not write books for restorative activity, I think also they tend to not get a puppy as a, you know, as a famously relaxing thing to do. I did all of those at the same time. And I questioned the wisdom of that synchronicity in hindsight, but it did work out. Typo is a bundle of joy, he did help me think about the world through the senses of another creature was now in my life. His full name is Typography, which is what he gets called when he’s bad. I love him to bits. And he cameos repeatedly throughout the book.

B&N: He’s a quite an excellent presence. But he’s not your only literary reference. I mean, obviously, we alluded to the Jane Austen mouthpiece. But let’s talk about you as a reader for a second, because it’s obvious that you very much care about your sentences and how the story goes. And really, ultimately, even if we’re talking about Star knows moles, we’re talking about story. And this matters. So you know, I know in the past, you’ve also mentioned Parasite Rex by buddy of yours called Carl Zimmer. But that can’t be the only literary influence on you.

EY: Oh, no, no, not at all. And in fact, my favorite science writers are the ones who I think, really bridge that gap, not gap. But you know, who straddled both of those worlds at the scientific and the literary and who, who managed to bring this intense sense of beauty and warmth and profundity to their work? So, you know, I know you’ve talked to Mary Roach before, I think she absolutely does that, you know, she is always described as the funniest science writer in America. And I think she is the undisputed holder of that title. I was I’ve just read a book by a friend of mine, Sabrina imbler, whose book How Far the Light Reaches, comes out in December. And it is a spectacular feat of nature writing, the likes of which I’ve never seen. It is a blend of memoir and marine biology. It’s Sabrina using their own life as a metaphor for the creatures of the deep and vice versa, in a way that like, in the hands of any less of a writer would not work and in their hands. Absolutely works. It’s just spectacular. Rebecca Giggs wrote a book called Fathoms about dance, about whales, but also about everything else about whales, right our relationship prevails, how we think about whales and again, like, just beautiful, soaring writing. When I was writing my first book, I contain multitudes, some of the people I look to, for inspiration included like Helen MacDonald, who’s H is for Hawk again, memoir and nature writing, how do you classify it, you kind of can’t. But it excels in all of those genres that it’s part of. There’s a lot out there and I sort of feel like we’re in this charmed golden age of nature writing where there’s so many people who are like breaking the boundaries of genre of form, and who are like describing nature and then science in just the most like achingly beautiful ways who bringing not just knowledge to their work, but like deep wisdom to all of that has like really inspired me as a writer like I can’t those those people I’ve named, and many more as like my guideposts my sources of inspiration.

B&N: I realize you’re about to start touring to support An Immense World but have you started thinking about the next book?

EY: Well, you say yes and no. I mean, hilariously like that. When I said that this the idea from this book came from my wife, Liz, I get through like periodic moments of self flagellation, often in the winter. So in the winter of 2018, I was having a moment where, like, you know, I contain multitudes been out for a few years, and I thought, like, my career is over, I’ve stagnated I will never do anything again, I might well have book ideas is run dry, you know, I’m just going to slink off into into obscurity and forevermore, and she snapped me out of that and suggested Why don’t you just write a book about animal sensors? And, and that was a great idea. So I say, I’m trying to think about what next? Firstly, everyone keeps asking me if I’m going to write a pandemic book. I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe, but firstly, like, it’s not over yet. And I do think it’s a little weird that like, a lot of books came out after year one, and like, that’s like chapter one of this very long story. I’m quite burned out with it. So finding like the mental and emotional strength and energy to do that project, I think is something for the future. Not right now, I still really want to write about the natural world, I care about it so much. And I love doing it so much. Both the books that I’ve written so far, I Contain Multitudes, which is about microbes around us, An Immense World about animal senses, both have this sort of connective tissue about revealing parts of our reality that we aren’t privy to, and that we don’t pay attention to, like showing bits of hidden meaning in the world that helped to take things that we take for granted, like our bodies, or our conscious experiences, and to make them feel new and fresh and wondrous, again, is the thing that gets me out of bed and gets me to my keyboard. So if I can see, like, maybe a trilogy of books that are, you know, which I’ve now written two that are around that idea. And I’m sort of noodling about what the third one might be. But, there’s definitely like, a theme that I want to chase a little bit further.

B&N: We can be patient. We can be patient.

EY: Maybe next time I’ll get through an entire book, leave and cry and go to bed but without a global disaster getting in the way. That will be delightful.

B&N: Okay, fingers crossed. Ed Yong, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. An Immense World is out now.

EY: Thanks so much for having me. This was great. I really enjoyed it.