Co-sponsored by The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities Distinguished Lecturer Series
About Ross Andersen
Since he joined The Atlantic, and in his previous job at Aeon Magazine in the UK, he primarily wrote feature length stories for the print magazine. These stories are difficult to characterize, because they often straddle several disciplines, but I usually tend to write long form narratives at the intersection between science, philosophy, and culture. For instance, in his most recent feature, for their March issue, was an exploration of the fast-moving science of animal consciousness, nested inside a narrative journey to India to visit the Jains, who were, some 2500 years ago, the first culture to take animal consciousness seriously from an ethical perspective. Before that, he visited China’s ambitious new radio telescope in that country’s rural southwest, for a feature about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the history of civilizational encounters on Earth. And before that, he visited Siberia for a feature about a father and son team who are trying to mitigate climate change with resurrected woolly mammoths.