http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041

Women’s Brains SJ Gould (in The Panda’s Thumb)
Living Water David Quaaman (in Natural Acts)
A Surgeon’s Life Oliver Sacks (in An Anthropologist on Mars)
1000 Cheeseburgers, or Getting Enough to Eat Eric P. Widmaier (in Why Geese Don’t Get Obese)
Small, Yes, but Mighty: The Molecule Called Water Natalie Angier http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/science/10angi.html?_r=1
The introduction to Oliver Morton’s new book. Eating the Sun up to the line “That’s what really happened today.

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/mar/cover

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12turt.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&sq=turtle%20angier&st=cse&scp=4

  http://www.viking.ucla.edu/Scientific_American/Egils_Bones.htm

The description of how a real disease (Paget’s disease) was consistent with what was described in the Prose Edda about Egil was a very interesting intersection of history with forensic medicine. It helps emphasize that humans living in the past were not so different from now.

“The Tragedy of the Commons,” by Garrett Hardin, Science 162:1243-1248, 1968. The classic that argued that it pays exploiters to exploit resources that are common property, such as air, some land, and some bodies of water.

The books are very anecdotal and biographical, but his all-encompassing curiosity and love of scientific inquiry illuminates everything. One of the chapters might make an interesting counterpoint to more topic-focused pieces. And of course he does write about Los Alamos, his part in the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle explosion, and other such fascinating moments in history.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact_preston

It took me a while to find the reference, but here it is:

Hypersearching the Web. By: Chakrabarti, Soumen, Dom, Byron, Kumar, S. Ravi, Raghavan, Prabhakar, Rajagopalan, Sridhar, Tomkins, Andrew, Kleinberg, Jon M., Gibson, David, Scientific American, 00368733, Jun99, Vol. 280, Issue 6

A version is available online at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/sciam99.html

Die, Robot

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.08/robots.html

Runner up:

Michael Rogers’s “Totality: A Report,” from Rolling Stone in 1972.

Also, as a commenter upthread mentioned Isaac Asimov, I’ll confess to my undying admiration of his essay “Forget It!”

No one has mentioned above (that I caught; apologies if I missed it) anything from Lewis Thomas’s Lives of A Cell. Published in 1974, three years before Gould’s first collection, it was one of the important touchstones for science writing in what those of us of a certain age see as something of a great age for the practice. Like much of Gould’s work, it was a collection of previously published essays — these from NEJM (! — Drs. expected to read liberal arts essays!) and it had a major and deserved public impact. I haven’t got it in front of me at this second — it’s in my office — but there are a lot of good pieces there. (Not that Gould isn’t worth including; it’s just that its important to remember that there are more than three good writers in the world.) (That said, the bibliography at Stephenjaygould.org reminds one of what an impressive career he had.)

What else? Roald Hoffman’s “The Same and Not the Same” is a wonderful, and almost completely overlooked collection of linked short pieces on the history and practice of chemistry. Good stuff there. For a strong does of skepticism about the practice of science itself, I’d prefer Gary Taubes’ book “Bad Science” on the cold fusion debacle to his fat article referenced above, but both are good. For a recent work by a a writer on science, as opposed to a scientist-writer, I’ve been touting to anyone I can Masha Gessen’s book “Blood Matters,” on the personal, social and scientific issues surrounding the rise of personal genomic medicine. Truly a wonderful book. For a shorter take on it, see her Slate series on her own path to decided what to do with the knowledge that she carries the BRCA 1 gene. That series begins here: http://www.slate.com/id/2102171/entry/2102173/.

Lots more, always more; good writing may not be as thick on the ground as bad, but this is truly a second (third…fourth….) great age for science writing. I’ve left out lots that I like, for reasons of space, perhaps, more because I write this in the wee hours before shoveling snow, away from most of my library, and I have brain bubbles. I’ve omitted any mention of the proprietor of this blog, figuring he knows what he likes in his body of work well enough.

I’ll indulge myself here at the far end of a comment too long for most to read by mentioning the one passage from my own work that, in the same vein, I like, whether or not anyone else finds it satisfying. That’s my account of the Minkowski’s concept of spacetime, to be found on pp. 91-95 of my book “Einstein in Berlin.”

And that reminds me that I forgot to mention Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” which, among much else, contains some of the best writing on to make the key ideas of atomic physics come to life in the first third of that massive tome.

That’s enough…

Robert Sapolsky on the “natural history of peace” Foreign Affairs Jan/Feb 2006
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060101faessay85110/robert-m-sapolsky/a-natural-history-of-peace.html

Jeffrey Rosen, “the Brain on the Stand”, NY Times Magazine 12/11/2007

“What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” gets my vote, too.

Huge impact. But I guess it can’t be the one that sticks in my head, since I didn’t remember it the first time around.