Stephen Hall in Person

Join us on Thursday, July 10 at 7 PM as Stephen Hall talks about his new book, Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World. He will be joined in conversation by Patricia Brennan.

About the Book

In this "wise and wondrous" (David Quammen) exploration, a science writer reintroduces readers to The Snake, encouraging our initial reaction to the slithery creature to be one of awe rather than disgust.

For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond. From the foundational deities of ancient Egypt to the reactions of squeamish children today, it is a historically commonplace belief that snakes are devious, dangerous, and even evil. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence. How is it that creatures so despised and sinister, so foreign of movement and ostensibly devoid of sociality and emotion, have fired the imaginations of poets, prophets, and painters across time and cultures?

In Slither, Stephen S. Hall presents a naturalistic, cultural, ecological, and scientific meditation on these loathed yet magnetic creatures. In each chapter, he explores a biological aspect of The Snake, such as their cold blooded metabolism and venomous nature, alongside their mythology, artistic depictions, and cultural veneration. In doing so, he explores not only what neurologically triggers our wary fascination with these limbless creatures, but also how the current generation of snake scientists is using cutting-edge technologies to discover new truths about these evolutionarily ancient creatures—truths that may ultimately affect and enhance human health.

About the Author

Stephen S. Hall has been reporting and writing about the intersection of science and society for more than 40 years. In addition to numerous cover stories in the New York Times Magazine, where he also served as a Story Editor and Contributing Writer, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, New York Magazine, Wired, Science, Nature, Scientific American, Discover, The Sciences, Hip-pocrates, Smithsonian, and more. He is also the author of six critically acclaimed non-fiction books about contemporary science. Among other honors, he has received the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism from the American Geophysical Union (2011); the Best Magazine Story of the Year from the American Association for the Advancement of Science-Kavli Foundation in 2017; and an honorary doctorate from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2023. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

Since 2007 Hall has served as an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, where he taught a core-curriculum graduate-school seminar in science writing at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) for ten years. He previously taught graduate seminars in science writing and explanatory journalism at Columbia University. Since 2009, he has also conducted hundreds of Science Communication Workshop sessions for scientists and doctors at NYU, Rockefeller University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

About Patricia Brennan

Patty obtained her undergraduate degree in Marine Biology in her native Colombia. After she graduated she joined the R/V Odyssey, a 98 foot ketch doing research on marine mammal populations around the Galapagos Islands She came to the USA to pursue a PhD., and after being accepted at Cornell University in the Neurobiology and Behavior program, she decided to switch from working on marine mammals to working with birds. She worked on the elusive Great Tinamous (Tinamus major) for her PhD. She started studying bird genitalia and has now expanded to examine snakes in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Keeffe, bats- a project led by Dr Teri Orr when she was a post-doc in her lab, dolphins, a project led by her previous post-doc collaborator Dr. Dara Orbach, sharks and more recently snakes. She lives in Amherst, MA at the beautiful Amethyst Farm. She teaches at Mount Holyoke College.