How do you choose your topics for a column or blog post? Your books?

Carl Zimmer Each genre works best for certain topics. I'm not going to write about the birth of neuroscience in the 1600s in a blog post, for example. Instead, I wrote a book about it (Sole Made Flesh). There are stories that have an intermediate heft, which make for good magazine features. My New York Times columns are about 800 to 1000 words, so I have to pick a well-focused story that can fit in those confines, but also have a relevance to New York Times readers. I use my blog The Loom as more of a playground, to write about things that I find intriguing just on their own terms.

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