Let’s take a break from “rage Friday” and enjoy a “science Friday” instead! Join us on October 23 as we welcome special guest Riley Black to discuss her new book Tyrant Lizard Queen. 
From the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black’s latest book is an imaginative celebration of Tyrannosaurus rex, tracking a dinosaur named Snaggletooth from hatching to adulthood. While T. rex is famous as a massive, bone-crushing predator, Black uses the latest fossil discoveries to reveal a more nuanced, sensitive life. Readers follow Snaggletooth as she navigates a dangerous Cretaceous North America—surviving hunts, tussling with rivals, courting, nesting, and finding moments of connection. The narrative offers even die-hard dinosaur fans a fresh perspective and deeper appreciation for the Tyrant Lizard Queen.
Riley Black (she/they) is the author of When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals and Evolution’s Greatest Romance, winner of the 2024 A Friend of Darwin Award, and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, winner of the 2023 AAAS/Subaru Prize for Excellence in Science Books.
Riley has been a fossil fanatic since the time she was knee-high to a Stegosaurus. Her evolution into a science writer and amateur paleontologist was only natural. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, right in the center of dinosaur country, they chase tales of vanished lives from museum collections to remote badlands.
A prolific writer, Riley’s byline has appeared in publications such as National Geographic, Slate, Smithsonian, Nature, Science, atmos, Popular Science, New Scientist, SIERRA, and many more. She’s also been a frequent guest on radio programs such as Science Friday and All Things Considered, and Riley was among the paleontologists highlighted in the NOVA documentaries “Alaskan Dinosaurs” and “Dinosaur Apocalypse.” In a dream come true, Riley was also the “resident paleontologist” and consultant to the Jurassic World franchise. Her expertise has also led Riley to speak at a variety of venues from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History to Dinosaur National Monument, most prominently delivering the 2022 keynote at tthe he annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting.
In They Poisoned the World, investigative journalist Mariah Blake exposes a decades-long cover-up of toxic “forever chemicals” contaminating the drinking water of 170+ million Americans. Tracing the pollution from the Manhattan Project to corporate labs, Blake reveals that manufacturers and the government knew these chemicals caused cancer and birth defects, yet lax regulations allowed the public to become unwitting test subjects. Based on extensive research, the book chronicles how a small New York village discovered the contamination in 2014, fought chemical giants, and ignited a powerful, historic grassroots environmental movement to protect public health.
Mariah Blake is an award-winning investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University. Her book, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, was named on of the best nonfiction books of 2025 by The Washington Post and Scientific American.
Join us on July 3 at noon (PT) as we welcome special guest Roopika Risam, PhD to discuss her latest book Data Empire: How Information Shaped Human History.
Roopika Risam is Professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth. Her research explores how histories of race, empire, and technology shape the modern world. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, taught in over 150 universities worldwide, and co- editor of four collections, including Anti-Racist Community Engagement and The Digital Black Atlantic. Her work has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from the NEH, Mellon Foundation, and others. She is also known for her public scholarship and digital projects, including Torn Apart/Separados, which visualized the U.S. government’s family separation policy at the border. Risam is past president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the U.S. scholarly organization for digital research in the humanities.
An NPR Summer Reading pick, Data Empire reframes human history through the lens of information, arguing that data has always been a primary tool of control and power. Tracing a lineage from Mesopotamian clay tablets and colonial record-keeping to modern corporate algorithms, the book reveals how collecting data makes civilization—and state surveillance—possible. It critiques how current data systems inherit historical inequalities, like colonialism and bias, while highlighting a modern shift from state to private corporate control. Ultimately, it serves as a sweeping history and urgent call to understand data’s power and imagine resistance today.
Join us on June 26 at noon for a conversation with the Desert Southwest Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. They’ll present the latest advancements in Alzheimer’s treatments.
Watch here.
Learn more about the Alzheimer’s Association.
Join us on June 12 at noon for a conversation with Scott Hamstra of Grandparents for Vaccines.
Grandparents for Vaccines is a volunteer-led movement formed to mobilize the voices of all grandparents, and all who care for grandchildren, to share stories of how vaccines changed their world. Their mission is to ensure that America’s grandchildren have their best start in life without the threat of vaccine-preventable diseases. https://grandparentsforvaccines.org/
Watch this virtual presentation.
Scott Hamstra is a pediatrician living and working with Native Americans here in Arizona since 1990. He joined Grandparents For Vaccines to help share real life stories about vaccine-preventable diseases. Dr Scott Hamstra
attended Northwestern University Medical School and did a Pediatrics Residency at Oakland Children’s Hospital, as well as a Pediatric Infectious Disease Fellowship, and Oakland Children’s Hospital.
His CDC awards include Highest Childhood Immunization rate, Indian Health Service (IHS); Arizona TAPI Daniel Cloud awards 90% Toddler Immunization Rate and 90% Teen immunization Rate. In 2004, he established the first national bidirectional electronic vaccine data exchange between IHS sites and State Immunization Information Systems (Arizona, ASIIS).
Currently, he’s a Medical Advisor to STChealth, Physician Advisor to APhA Foundation, IHS Tucson Area Immunization Coordinator, on the TAPI (The Arizona Partnership for Immunizations) Steering Committee, and a
Grandparents for Vaccines State Leader for Arizona.
Join us on April 17 at noon (PST) as we welcome special guests Kent Anderson and Joy Moore to discuss their book How the Internet Disrupted Science.
.Science is in trouble. A growing number of actors have developed selfish, misleading, or criminal ways to exploit it, dumping nonsense into our information streams and eroding trust, justifying their actions with Big Tech tools and tech-adjacent thinking that more information is better. Anti-science forces have been working to delegitimize science. Silicon Valley politics have corrupted it. Even the speed of digital communication is problematic. Concepts behind AI carry risks of centralized power controlling a more impenetrable “truth.”
How the Internet Disrupted Science tells the story of what went wrong.
Kent Anderson has worked in scholarly and scientific publishing for nearly thirty years, serving as Director of Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics when the initial vaccine-autism link was forged in mass media; working as Publishing Director at the New England Journal of Medicine; serving as CEO of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery; and working as Publisher at AAAS/Science. He also founded two of the most influential blogs in scholarly publishing, the Webby-nominated Scholarly Kitchenand his current paid e-newsletter, the Geyser. Through these, he has kept a near-daily pulse on activities in the space since 2007. He lives and works as a consultant outside of Boston.
Joy Moore landed her first job out of college in a scientific journal editorial office in Chapel Hill, NC in 1995, in the days of fax, on the cusp of the internet. She quickly became a key player in the discovery and adoption of technology into the workflow to produce, disseminate, and monetize scholarly and medical products. She has worked for or with nearly every major global commercial publisher, scientific society, platform vendor, technology partner, and funding body in the space. Blackwell (later Wiley), Nature, Wolters Kluwer, McGraw-Hill, The American Medical Association, Silverchair, and EBSCO, to name a few. Her current home base is Williamsburg, Virginia.
Hate scorpions? Got it out for rattlesnakes? Think cockroaches are creepy? Think again! Join us on May 8 at noon (PST) as we welcome zoologist Dr. Jo Wimpenny to discuss her latest book, The Beauty of the Beasts: Rethinking Nature’s Least Loved Animals.
Dr. Jo Wimpenny is a zoologist and writer with a research background in animal behavior and the history of science. She studied Zoology at the University of Bristol, and went on to research problem-solving in crows and tool use for her DPhil at Oxford University. After postdoctoral research on the history of ornithology at Sheffield, she authored Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables and co-authored Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, which won the 2015 PROSE award for History of Science, Medicine and Technology. Jo writes for BBC Wildlife and has previously presented at the BA Festival of Science, Science Oxford, the Royal Society Summer Science Fair and Glasgow Science Fair.
Buy the book at Changing Hands Bookstore!
Join us on August 28 at noon (PT) as we welcome special guest Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, PhD to discuss her latest book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, dark matter, and neutron stars. She is also a researcher of Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. She is also the creator of the Cite Black Women+ in Physics and Astronomy Bibliography. Her first book The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred (Bold Type Books) won the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the science and technology category, the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Science Award, and a 2022 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s second book for general audiences, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie (Pantheon Books) is now available for preorder wherever books are sold and will debut April 7, 2026 (US/Canada) and May 7, 2026 (UK/Europe). She is now working on an academic book, The Cosmos is a Black Aesthetic (Duke University Press). Originally from East L.A., she divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The book is described as “the story of everything, from the Big Bang to the far-off future 100 million years at a time, told in illuminating text and imaginative illustrations that portray every phase of our cosmic history.”
Ethan Siegel was born in New York, graduated college from Northwestern, and obtained his PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Florida in 2006. In 2008, he moved to the Pacific Northwest, becoming a professor at the University of Portland and then Lewis & Clark college, while also beginning a career as a science communicator writing the popular and prolific blog Starts With A Bang. Since 2015, he’s been a full-time science communicator, including writing, podcasting, authoring books, and presenting science to audiences all over the world. His 6th and most recent book, The Grand Cosmic Story, was just published by National Geographic.
Click here to listen to his podcast.
You can follow Ethan on his social media at (facebook, bluesky, X, ScienceKind, Mastodon), all found at
StartsWithABang.
Our Moon was long listed for the National Book Award, a national bestseller, and is described as “A riveting feat of science writing that recasts that most familiar of celestial objects into something eerily extraordinary, pivotal to our history, and awesome in the original sense of the word.”—Ed Yong.
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A NEW YORKER AND SMITHSONIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Focusing on the provision of gender-affirming care, Health Care Civil Rights analyzes the difficulties and potential of discrimination law in healthcare settings. The application of civil rights law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the US, but conservative challenges and the complex and fragmented nature of our health care system have limited the real-world success of this strategy. Revealing deep divides and competing interests that reverberate through patient experiences, insurance claims, and courtroom arguments, Anna Kirkland explains what health care civil rights are, how they work in theory and practice, and how to strengthen them.
In Original Sin, acclaimed psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden explores how genetics complicates traditional concepts of blame, punishment, and moral responsibility. Integrating cutting-edge DNA research with personal insights, Harden examines the tension between biological constraints and human agency through the lenses of addiction, violence, and antisocial behavior. Rather than using science to absolve wrongdoers or make guilt obsolete, she challenges readers to reckon differently with fairness. Ultimately, this revelatory inquiry urges us to move past ancient nature-versus-nurture debates to imagine a more humane, realistic vision of accountability for ourselves and society.
Join us on August 14 at noon (PT) as we welcome special guest Mariah Blake to discuss her latest book 
Join us on July 3 at noon (PT) as we welcome special guest Roopika Risam, PhD to discuss her latest book 
