Running to the Noise, Episode 21

Carmen: As we get ready for season three this fall, we thought we’d close out the summer with a conversation worth revisiting—one with journalist and author Sonia.

Sonia came back to campus this May to deliver a powerful commencement address, thirty-five years after her own graduation from Oberlin. In this episode, you’ll hear about the bold ideas behind her work, including her forthcoming book Special, which takes on the idea that humans sit at the top of the natural order.

Like all of our Obies, Sonia has been busy. She dropped a TEDx talk this month that flips the script on migration, seeing it not as a crisis but as a solution. You’ll find links to both her TED Talk and her words to our 2025 graduates in the show notes. We’ll be back in September with new voices, new conversations, and that same Oberlin spirit you’ve come to expect.

But for now, settle in for this thought-provoking exchange with Sonia. And thank you, as always, for running to the noise with us.

Sonia: We’ve known how to cure malaria since the sixteen-hundreds. That’s when Jesuit missionaries in Peru discovered the bark of the cinchona tree, and inside that bark was quinine—still an effective cure for malaria to this day. So we’ve known how to cure malaria for centuries. We’ve known how to prevent malaria since 1897.

That’s when the British Army surgeon Ronald Ross discovered that it was mosquitoes that carried malaria, not bad air or miasmas, as was previously thought. So malaria should be a relatively simple disease to solve. And yet, to this day, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die from the bite of a mosquito.

Why is that?

Carmen: I’m Carmen Twillie Ambar, president of Oberlin College and Conservatory. Welcome to Running to the Noise, where I speak with all sorts of folks who are tackling our toughest problems and working to spark positive change around the world. Because here at Oberlin, we don’t shy away from the challenging situations that threaten to divide us. We run towards them.

Science journalist Sonia has a gift for making stories about microbes and migration read like best-selling fiction. But make no mistake—she is a fierce skeptic, challenging our popular assumptions and long-held scientific beliefs about everything from the way we test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs to how we combat infectious disease.

In a piece in The Nation published just one month after the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S., Sonia wrote that exotic animals weren’t to blame for the virus. The real culprits were humans and our assault on the environment. She’s like the best friend who tells you the truth you don’t want to know, but need to hear.

Her tough love has earned her fans and accolades. Sonia is the author of five books, and her TED Talk Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria has been viewed by more than one million people around the world. This year, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her trailblazing work, joining past honorees Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Ken Burns, and Thelonious Monk.

Sonia’s newest book, the soon-to-be-published Special: The Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea, might be her most radical challenge yet to our collective wisdom—the notion that we are the smartest creatures on the planet. In Special, she writes that scientists have discovered the self-awareness of fish and the elaborate underground communication network of trees. They’ve uncovered a scale and complexity in the movement patterns of insects and birds that can only be explained by collective intelligence that exceeds our own.

So, what’s the harm in thinking we’re the kings and queens of the jungle? I’m so excited to talk to Sonia so she can tell us all about it. Welcome, Sonia. It’s so great to have you on Running to the Noise.

Sonia: Thanks for having me.

Carmen: We are excited to have this conversation today. I’m really interested in your new book Special: The Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea. You challenge us to think about this notion that we’ve all come to accept—that humans are exceptional.

Why is that a wrong-headed view of the world? That we’re the kings and queens of the jungle has felt right for so long. So tell us why we’re wrong.

Sonia: I wouldn’t say we’re wrong in the sense that we’re not special at all. What I am trying to argue is that we’re not special in any special way. But what I’m trying to problematize in this book is the idea that humans are a special category in nature.

We’re not like other animals. We’re not continuous with other animals. They are kind of a homogenous mass and we’re outside of them. We don’t really have a place in nature—in a sense we are kind of above it and separated from it because we’re so special. So that’s the idea that I think is very foundational in Western society, and that’s what I problematize in this new book.

Carmen: So it’s fascinating. I guess one of the things that you talk about, and that maybe has been one of the reasons why we’ve stood apart or saw ourselves as so special, is our use of language. It’s maybe a superpower, so to speak.

And I know you spoke to a lot of researchers when you were thinking about this work and found all these ways that other species communicate. What did you discover about the communication of other species that made you feel like, hey, humans, you’re good, but there are a lot of species out there communicating really effectively?

Sonia: I mean, I think we just don’t know enough about how other species communicate. That was the thing that probably struck me the most—how do we even start to understand how animals that live underwater and communicate through three-dimensional acoustic signatures, how might they be combining those things? And what would they even be communicating about? What is on their minds?

These are just things that we can’t really fathom. So what we do instead is we test other species based on, do they talk like us? Can they make sounds like us? Can they combine them the way we do? Do they have things like alphabets and phonemes? I think language has been part of the way we look at other species in terms of hierarchy, right? There’s a ladder.

And that’s a really, really old idea. You know, in the Western tradition there’s this ancient idea of, okay, there’s God, and then there’s angels, and then there’s humans, and then there’s certain kinds of animals, and then there’s birds, and then there’s vermin, and then soil and rocks. Everything has a rung on a ladder.

We’ve incorporated that into science, even though it actually is not a scientific idea. Evolution doesn’t render a ladder. It doesn’t render verticality. So if we think of other species as equally evolved as we are—and I think that that is also what science tells us, what basic Darwinian biology tells us—but it’s not really something that we have truly absorbed, right? That other species are the survivors of billions of years of evolution as we all are.

Carmen: Like we’re kin. Conceptually, when you think of things hierarchically, you think that because you are higher up the rung, you get a chance to do what you will, so to speak. And that means that humans operate in this plane of our planet, willing to do things that they might not do if they didn’t think of it as hierarchical.

Sonia: Yeah, that’s exactly it. That is why we need to think about this idea more closely, in my opinion. Because we think of the other species as not having moral agency or moral value, because they are to us almost inanimate on some level. Even in our language, other animals are called it.

“Oh, I saw that cat. It was scratching its paw.” And that’s even journalistically—that is the style, that’s how we’re supposed to talk about them, as if they are its. And in the law, of course, they are property. They’re objects. We don’t consider them legal persons, even though we will consider a ship a legal person, or a corporation a legal person. Human entities can be legal persons, but a non-human species just cannot be a legal person—quote unquote “natural resources” that we can then use or exploit.

Carmen: Use however we choose.

Sonia: Yeah, we can do whatever we want with it.

Carmen: So we’re talking about humankind and the use of language, but also language in other species. Maybe you could give us some examples of the kind of unorthodox ways that animals communicate that we might not recognize as humans.

Sonia: Yeah, there’ve been some really interesting studies showing that animals can have intentionality, that they can understand symbols that are arbitrary symbols for things. The methods by which scientists do this are sometimes really clever.

There’s a great study by a cognitive scientist, Diana Reiss. She’s been working with bottlenose dolphins for a long time, and she knew that they do these complex whistles to each other. She had this great story where she was watching the dolphins in the tank. One of them was pregnant. And dolphins, when they’re born, they actually don’t know to come up to the surface for air.

They need to be taught that—their mothers need to push them up to the surface. So this dolphin mother had given birth, and the dolphin baby was kind of flailing around. And the dolphin mother, instead of helping her baby get up to the surface, just started circling around the tank aimlessly. And then they hear on their headphones—they have hydrophones on, so they’re listening to all the dolphins all the time. They hear the other dolphin in the tank, who was this older female dolphin who had already had babies...

Sonia: She lets out this long, complex whistle, and immediately the other dolphin mother, who had been circling aimlessly, rushes over to the baby and starts pushing it up to the surface. These are clues, right? Like, what is happening with that whistle?

Reiss came up with the idea that basically what you need is some kind of decoder—some kind of code that you know the answers to, and they can learn them. A Rosetta Stone. Exactly. So she basically comes up with that by creating an underwater keyboard.

The keyboard has nine keys on it. Each key has a different visual symbol. The dolphins can depress these buttons with their nostrils—which is like what we would call their nose, but it’s not their nose. And when they press the button, it makes a computer-generated whistle. That is associated with some kind of toy or treat.

There’s a button that gives a whistle, and then the dolphins would get a ball. Or they would get a ring, or they would get a belly rub, or whatever. And they keep rotating the keys around, like a vending machine where the keys are always in a different place. So the dolphins start playing with this.

The older dolphins press it once, and then they’re like, I’m out of here. They hear the whistle, and they just swim away really fast. But the younger dolphins press the buttons, and they start to get the treats. And then they understand—oh, I press this button, I get fish. And they keep doing it. She puts it in for half an hour a day, and so there are these different sessions.

And then one day, she’s listening. They’re playing with the keyboard, and she hears the computer-generated sound for “ball.” And the dolphins get the ball. And then she hears another sound—and that is the dolphin making the whistle for “ball.”

At first, the dolphin’s making the beginning of the whistle. Then the middle of the whistle. Then the end of the whistle. And they put it together until they finally get a perfect mimic.

Carmen: They can mimic it fully.

Sonia: Yeah, they mimic it fully. And they’re doing that while they’re playing with the ball. So it’s not like they’re hearing the sound and they’re just going to echo this—meaninglessly echo it. They’re playing with the ball and they’re making the sound. And so she was freaking out.

She prints it all out, gets spectrographs, makes sure it’s all happening. And then later they find that the dolphins have incorporated that phrase, this computer-generated whistle, into their own language lexicon. So whenever they’re playing with the ball, they don’t even press the button anymore.

Carmen: They’re just calling it.

Sonia: They’re just calling it. They’ve essentially learned this word that the humans came up with for them, which just gives you a sense of what their cognitive capacities probably are.

Carmen: Incredible. Incredible. And full disclosure to the audience, some of you all know that I’m a vegetarian. It has not necessarily been a political thing for me, but it certainly is on this notion of thinking about animals and other species as something with souls.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the testing of animals, our ability to understand the efficacy of drug usage, but I know you’ve written a bit about the case for free-range lab mice. Tell us a little bit about your views on the reliance on animals for experiments, for testing the safety and effectiveness of drugs.

Sonia: This goes back to the seventeenth century, with René Descartes saying animals are machines and humans are the only ones with minds, and they are essentially automatons. And so this idea became really central, and I think that’s how Darwinian evolution was also interpreted.

Our bodies might be similar to animals, but our minds are not. We’re the only ones with minds. So this idea then becomes really central to biomedical experimentation, where we can use animals because they are all body, and their bodies are similar to ours. Therefore, we can use them as models. They have no mind, and so we don’t have to ask for their permission.

We can just use them without the voluntary informed consent that we would require to experiment on other humans. So this sort of contradictory relationship to animals is the underlying logic of experimenting on them. But because scientists characterize lab animals as pure biological matter, we have this whole infrastructure of experimenting on animals and breeding them as if they are widgets—bred brother to sister over ten or more generations, kept in sterile environments, fed sterile foods, kept in identical shoebox-sized cages, never seeing the sun or feeling the wind or the rain.

And yet we expect that whatever happens in their bodies is somehow physiologically the same as what would happen in our bodies.

Carmen: Just the way they are being kept is going to impact the way they respond to this drug treatment.

Sonia: We just don’t take that into consideration at all.

Carmen: And if I remember correctly, some of the things you wrote about suggest that may be why, when you get to their use in humans, they don’t bear any resemblance to what happened in the phases with animals.

Sonia: And it’s also that even though they’ve been standardized genetically and pathogenically, these are living creatures who still have individuality and awareness of things that we fundamentally just don’t know about.

Sonia: They can sense magnetism. They can sense ultraviolet light. They can sense the sex of a human who enters the room, and it changes their physiology. And yet none of that is taken into account.

When something doesn’t work in lab animals, that stops the drug development, right? “Well, that’s not going to work—throw that out.” But if it does work, then eventually you test it in humans, and sometimes it works and we get new drugs. Every drug that we get has been tested on animals first, by law. But what about all the things that work in animals and don’t work in humans? That’s actually a huge number—in fact, most of them.

Carmen: Well, I thought it was fascinating—you talked a little bit about it—just the way that lab rats responded differently to the male person who came in the room and was handling the rat versus the female, showing different levels of pain depending on who the handler was.

Sonia: That’s right. And it’s something that no one has been recording at all. That has never really been tracked systematically. And data based on these sorts of uncontrolled variables is all across the biomedical literature, right? This entire edifice of knowledge that we have built—it’s like a house of cards in a way. Where do you find those studies that were actually not because of the drug, but because there was a dude in the room instead of a woman?

Carmen: All of these biases build on each other, providing results that are unclear, because we don’t know all the ways we’ve built this infrastructure to include these biases—and ways that we are treating animals, who’s handling them—all those different pieces coming together to make it really unclear.

Sonia: Yeah, I mean, it’s noise, right? And there’s always noise in this kind of data, and scientists are trained to ferret out the signal in the noise. So I’m not saying it’s not possible to do that, but if we want what happens to them to be a mirror to what happens to us, we need to think more seriously about what their worldview is and what their whole subjective lives are like and how that matters.

Right, so that’s—you know—that was kind of where I landed in an article in The New Yorker that I wrote about on this topic. Ultimately, scientists were saying, “Look, let’s just unlatch the cage—let them out—and then see: how do these interventions work on them?” Because then they’re more like us in that way.

Carmen: So help the audience understand what that would mean. We’re going to have free-range mice out in what—some kind of contained environment, but free-flowing?

Sonia: There are different models. It’s like a mini-movement within certain circles in biomedical lab-animal science—immunologists in particular—because the immune systems of mice who live in these kinds of socially deprived conditions can be disordered.

So, for example, what this one scientist I reported on was doing is taking mice and, instead of keeping them in cages, letting them loose in a large enclosure that’s naturalistic—sort of semi-natural, right? So they’re not free to go wherever they want, but they have, like, a barn basically to live in. And they can socialize with each other, they can mate with whoever they want, they have nesting materials, they can nest wherever they want. And he gives half of them just regular food and half of them regular food plus whatever the drug or intervention is.

And then you wait a while and you see—well, who does better? Do the mice who got the drug have more offspring who are stronger and more resilient, or fewer? That would be a way to see: does this drug sort of have some kind of subtle effect on immunity? There are lots of imaginative new ways to rethink it, but I think the underlying idea is: why did we even get to this place where we’re thinking about animals this way?

Carmen: Right. One of the reasons why this topic interests me so much—when I was just finishing up college, I read a book about the kind of industrial complex of how we treat animals for food consumption and for experimental testing. And it’s one of the things that drove me to be a vegetarian—just the way we treat animals.

Sonia: And I think we could also—I mean, there are new technologies so that you could experiment on human cells or human tissues or these little organoids that you can grow in a dish, essentially. There are different models you could think about if you did get to a place where, as a society, we decided, “Look, this is not morally justified—to treat these creatures this way—and also it’s not really working. It’s very expensive, and we’re getting all these false positives—spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs that work in lab animals that end up failing in humans.”

Sonia: Malaria occurs in some of the poorest and most remote places on earth. And there’s a reason for that. If you’re poor, you’re more likely to get malaria. If you’re poor, you’re more likely to live in rudimentary housing on marginal lands. It’s poorly drained. These are places where mosquitoes breed. You’re less likely to have door screens or window screens. You’re less likely to have electricity and all the indoor activities that electricity makes possible. So you’re outside more. You’re getting bitten by mosquitoes more.

Carmen: So let’s talk a little bit about the sort of perils of human exceptionalism in terms of the spread of COVID-19. You argue that the coronavirus was, as you describe it, Frankenstein’s monster—a creature of our own making. And I was hoping you could give us a better sense of why you felt that was so, and why this sort of sense of human exceptionalism may have us thinking in ways that are not helpful when you think about the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19.

Sonia: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there, but—yeah, give me some softballs.

Sonia: You know better.

Sonia: I mean, one of the reasons I got onto this topic of human exceptionalism was my experience in writing about pandemics—and not just the book Pandemic, which came out in 2016, but also in my book about malaria, which I’d written previous to that.

And this sense that microbes are these things that live in germy animals who are unhygienic, and that we have to protect our pristine humanity from being encroached upon by the dirty animal others. It’s sort of embedded in germ theory, which is the basis of modern medicine, right? These germs don’t live inside of us; they’re outside of us. They invade us from the external environment, and we need to, like, have assault weapons and defenses to ward them off. It’s this kind of military-invasion idea. And that’s—you know—it’s been really successful, if you consider antibiotics. Those really work.

Carmen: That approach has served us in some ways.

Sonia: It has served us, for sure.

Sonia: But at the same time, I think it obscures the fact that we are microbes—you know, the microbes live inside of us. And a lot of the time, when I’ve been digging into, “Well, where do these pathogens come from?”, in Pandemic I was looking at cholera in particular. I was trying to figure out, well, where does Vibrio cholerae come from, right? It causes this terrible disease in humans.

Turns out that Vibrio cholerae usually lives very peacefully in marine environments. It’s a normal inhabitant of salty tropical waters. It lives in conjunction with plankton and actually helps to recycle nutrients in that environment.

And if humans hadn’t started intensively developing wetlands—especially in places like the Bay of Bengal during the British Raj, cutting down all those mangrove swamps—and suddenly humans become very intimately exposed to this salty water that has this bacteria in it… That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t decided to cut down those mangroves and turn them into rice paddies.

These are generally places where humans didn’t really want to live. You’re covered in swamps, there are tigers or cyclones—these are kind of marginal areas for human habitation. But because of our kind of extractive, “let’s get more and more, more”…

Carmen: Yeah, let’s just kind of take over the planet, so to speak.

Sonia: Yeah, exactly—spreading us into every little corner. Then this bacterium that is normally this placid bacterium—not causing disease in anyone—jumps into the human body, finds a new niche inside the human gut, where it performs a totally different kind of function, reversing the normal functioning of our gut.

So that instead of replenishing the body with fluids, the cholera-infected gut actually extracts fluids from the body and expels them. And then this becomes a huge problem, right? And we carry it everywhere because of early industrial development—following traders and soldiers out of the Bay of Bengal into Russia, into Paris and London and Hamburg, and then traveling across the ocean on our super-new ships that we were putting into place in the nineteenth century.

If it had been a slower process, cholera would have died out before it could get to Canada or North America. But we were moving faster, so it could get there. And then it gets there—and if it had gotten there maybe a hundred or fifty years earlier, it would have stopped right at the coast because most of North America is kind of impenetrable by water. But of course we had developed coal, and we had started steam engines, and we had started building canals, and so we suddenly had this whole network of waterways. Perfect—cholera can come right over and then spread all throughout the Mississippi, into New York City, into all of our new cities on the eastern seaboard.

So is it Vibrio cholerae that caused the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century and continuing on, or is it kind of us? You know—that was the question.

Carmen: You know, it’s funny you mention that, because I know you talk about this in the context of COVID-19 as well. Some of the parallels that I think you make are things like overcrowded nursing homes with lots of staff who are underpaid and have to work in multiple nursing homes—and so that’s one place where there’s all of this deep spread of COVID-19. Or you have a city like Detroit that has this terrible issue with its water and a lack of ability to have as much cleanliness and handwashing.

All of these things are human behaviors that we don’t necessarily tie to COVID-19, but that’s the Frankenstein’s monster I think you’re trying to describe. Yes, it is the spread of this disease—us maybe being closer to the disease than we might normally have been in our closeness to animals and other things—but it’s also our behavior. And maybe it’s our lack of recognizing that thinking of ourselves as exceptional has not helped us think about the ways that we contribute to the spread of these diseases.

Sonia: We obscure our own agency in a lot of ways by thinking of ourselves as kind of pure and pristine and that the germs are going to come and get us. I mean, if you think about microbial pathogens, they can’t move on their own. They have no independent locomotion. We have to carry them to each other. It’s an alliance. A disease comes out of a human–microbe interaction.

And it’s also not just in humans, right? This is another thing that was obscured, I think, during the COVID pandemic: it’s a multi-species phenomenon. It’s happening in all these other species also. Think about a deer getting COVID from eating grass that has been contaminated with dog poo from a dog that got it from his owner. And then the deer salivating on the grass, and then that spreading to a mouse. It goes on and on and on, because we are all intimately mixed together.

Carmen: Now that you say that, I don’t think we talked much about the other species. I mean, we talked about it from the species transmission to humans—what we believe may have happened, the origin stories—but we never spent much time thinking about the impact of COVID-19 on other species besides our own.

Sonia: Yeah, and I think that’s actually where a lot of the gaps occurred that made us more vulnerable. One thing that was so striking when I was reporting on COVID was I talked to this veterinary epidemiologist named Linda Saif, and she had been studying coronaviruses in animals for decades.

The general history of coronaviruses that you saw often in the press was like, well, first there was SARS-CoV-1, right? And now we have this one. There was this very sparse, potted history you would get. But she gave me this story of coronaviruses in animals that stretches back centuries, involving dozens of animals—cows, horses, dogs, pigs—all these different species that are getting coronaviruses, passing them on, and every now and then maybe a couple of humans might get it.

We are part of this whole multi-species phenomenon that’s been going on for all this time, and we saw it in just this tiny snapshot. Sometimes sparks fly off and get into humans, and then we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to just focus on that—that’s the whole history,” you know? So we’re missing this bigger picture. And what that also means is that we’re missing all the expertise of the people who’ve been studying it in animals. But no one even asked them to sit on the big councils and the committees of experts who got together to figure out what to do about coronavirus in humans. They were all medical experts—which, yeah, you need medical experts—but medical experts only look at the health of one species. We’re missing all the other species.

Carmen: Right. And missing all the expertise. So this podcast is called Running to the Noise because when Michelle Obama came to Oberlin to be the graduation speaker, she described Obies as people who run to the noise, who run to the challenge, who run to the uncertainty. And so I am wondering what in your own life or your own work is how you run to the noise.

Sonia: The first thing that comes to mind is this election that’s coming up. I have been heavily involved in trying to make sure people come out and vote and make their voices heard. This was something I actually held myself apart from for a long time, you know?

Carmen: Politics specifically, or political activism—what were you holding yourself apart from?

Sonia: It was organizing around electoral politics in particular. I was involved in activist journalism. I did a lot of that. I did a lot of left journalism for a long time, but I never felt like I should do anything kind of hands-on. I don’t actively lobby for any policy, don’t be an advocate, don’t go to protests. Like, I didn’t do that.

Carmen: Yeah, that wasn’t your space.

Sonia: That wasn’t my space. And I actually felt like as a journalist I should, you know, hold myself out.

Carmen: Yeah, I’ve heard lots of journalists say that.

Sonia: But I do feel like we’re in a different moment now, because of polarization and because of the rise of white supremacy—and political leaders like Donald Trump are emboldening those once-obscured parts of our society. Deeply rooted parts of our society are now being unleashed and emboldened, and are coalescing. I think we all need to step up.

I have gone way out of my comfort zone—canvassing and phone banking and organizing volunteers to go to swing states, knocking on doors—because I don’t see how we can live in a society together unless we really speak for it when it’s under attack.

Carmen: Right. I kind of appreciate the sense that the stakes of this election make you do some things that are outside of your comfort zone. And I know our students hear that when they’re thinking about their own efforts this year to be involved in all sorts of ways, politically and socially.

Sonia (clip): That’s not to say that malaria’s unconquerable, because I think it is. But what if we attack this disease according to the priorities of the people who live with it? Take the example of England and the United States. We had malaria in those countries for hundreds of years, and we got rid of it completely. Not because we attacked malaria—we didn’t. We attacked bad roads and bad houses and bad drainage and lack of electricity and rural poverty. We attacked malaria’s way of life, and by doing that we slowly built malaria out. Attacking malaria’s way of life—it’s not fast, it’s not cheap, it’s not easy, but I think it’s the only lasting way forward.

Carmen: You know, one of the things I think is so special about your writing: you have this way of, one, making it accessible to popular culture, and then taking what oftentimes feels really complex and making it accessible to the average reader. I’m wondering where you think that skill set came from.

Sonia: Well, that’s a great question, and thank you for the compliments embedded inside the question. I feel like part of my upbringing as a bicultural person has lent itself to a feeling that I’m always being a translator. My parents, who come from India and have a distinct worldview that is different than the worldview of the popular American culture that my sister and I became part of. And so there were always acts of translation going on growing up.

Also, because I am a curious but shy person, I was attracted to learning new things about new topics all the time—not really drilling down into one thing. And so I’m always kind of an outsider. That’s my comfortable place, right? I’m not inside the group; I’m kind of adjacent to it.

And I think that has also helped with—if you’re too much of an expert in your area, it becomes very difficult to describe to people who are outside of it. What are the stakes? Why is this significant? Why am I doing this anymore? You kind of lose sight of that because you’re so deep into your own area. I think why journalism always appealed to me is that you get to just ask strangers questions and have them translate what they’re doing for you into ways that you can understand as an outsider. That’s part of why the translation that is necessary in science journalism feels comfortable to me.

Carmen: I’ve been calling that “outsider’s integrity” in some writing that I’ve done—around what makes people from nontraditional backgrounds pursue these careers where they’re not traditionally represented; what makes them interesting in those spaces and places. And it can be this outsider’s integrity that comes from being outside the system, and therefore a willingness to question it and challenge it in ways that it hadn’t been challenged.

Sonia: It’s funny, because going to Oberlin—then of course everyone’s like that, right?

Carmen: Yeah. It’s a whole group of students and faculty and staff.

One of the other talents that I think is so powerful in your writing, and makes it really effective for the audience, is how you put yourself in lots of your stories. I remember this moment where you are with an ornithologist and you’re holding a captive cuckoo in your hand for your story. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that as a strategy. Is that purposeful, intentional, or does it just come naturally to you?

Sonia: That’s been something I’ve developed in my writing. I was not comfortable with putting myself in my writing in the beginning at all. I guess I just didn’t feel like I was important enough or significant—I didn’t think it was interesting. I thought I was there to explain what I’d found. You write a book report, right? The person who’s reading the book report wants to hear about the book. They don’t want to care about what you were doing while you were reading the book.

So I guess I just had that very conventional understanding of what the kind of writing I was doing was supposed to be. But I realized reading and writing—it’s such an intimate thing. I know when I’m reading something, I am hearing the author’s voice in my head; it’s like they are whispering in your ear. And it’s a very intimate thing, and it’s just me and that person, and it’s like we’re having a conversation. I remember feeling this way when I was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and I had listened to Terry Gross for, like, all the time…

Sonia: All this time. She gets on the headphones, but like, hi Sonia, I’m Terry Gross. I do an interview show called Fresh Air and we talked and she’s explaining this to me and I was like, Terry, I know your best friend. What are you talking about?

And I realized then it just testifies the idea that you have this intimate relationship with the writers that you read also because of that. You have to explain where you’re at. You know, you don’t go up to a stranger in the supermarket checkout line and tap her on the shoulder and say, hey, I want to tell you all about coronavirus and here’s some details. That’s like, Ruth, don’t do that.

You start with where the person’s at. Like, oh, hey, I noticed you’re carrying this bag with this logo. And I have the same bag. You make a connection with the person first. And that requires exposing yourself of who you are and why you want to talk to them.

I had that insight at some point. I thought putting myself in my stories was kind of conceited or something. But then I realized it’s actually just the opposite. Like holding myself out was well had an arrogance to it.

Carmen: Oh wow. That is so great. It’s such a powerful way to write. And I want to thank you for being the image that our students can look to to know that what they want to achieve is possible. So thank you so much for joining us. And I am so happy that you had a chance to be able to run into the noise.

Sonia: Thank you so much. This was lovely.

Carmen: Thanks for listening to Running to the Noise, a podcast produced by Oberlin College and Conservatory. Our music is composed by Professor of Jazz Guitar Bobby Ferrazza and performed by the Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble, a student group created through the support of the legendary jazz musician.

If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online so Oberlin and other folks can find this too. I’m Carmen Twillie Ambar and I’ll be back soon with more great conversations from thought leaders on and off our campus.