Nabokov 2.0: Expanded story, plus reactions

Last Tuesday evening, my article on Nabokov and butterflies went live on the New York Times web site. My editor and I decided on that timing to coincide with the lifting of the embargo on a new paper providing genetic support to a hypothesis Nabokov had about butterfly evolution. But that left a few days before it would appear in print in tomorrow's Science Times. So my editor provided me the opportunity to add to the piece in the intervening time.

I rarely get two bites at the journalistic apple, so this was a welcome surprise. I beefed up my account of Nabokov's lepidopteran revival, which started with the work of Kurt Johnson and others–which Johnson recounts in Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. (Johnson is a co-author on the new study, too.)

And I also added a section about an amazing coincidence: another group of scientists recently published a molecular study backing another hypothesis of Nabokov's–that Karner's Blue Butterfly is a separate species. The man knew his butterflies.

If you don't get the Times in print, you can read the version 2.0 online now. The print story is accompanied by ...