The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

I always enjoy these essay collections. I was flustered that the editions cover the preceding year, so this one was actually 2019 articles. Aaarghhh. I wanted an overview of Covid science!! Oh well - onto the next one!

This one had lots of gems. Stuff that really struck me:
- The horrors of California wildfires, as experienced on the ground.
- Two excellent paleontology articles (who knew I loved paleontology so much).
- An adorable buddy movie about astrophysicists trying to find Planet Nine.
- A heartbreaking one about a young girl's mental health.
- A great one about immunotherapy.

Less exciting was the stodgy New Yorker article about natural language processing, large language models (aka, LLMs, aka ChatGPT and “AI”). There wasn't anything explicitly factually incorrect about it - it does a decent job of describing what LLMs are, etc - and I even agreed with some of the opinionated Luddite hand-wringing. But something altogether about it felt cringe.