Showing results by author "Kate Zernike" in All Categories

In 1963, a female student was attending a lecture given by Nobel Prize winner James Watson, then tenured at Harvard. At nineteen, she was struggling to define her future. She had given herself just ten years to fulfill her professional ambitions before starting the family she was expected to have. For women at that time, a future on the usual path of academic science was unimaginable—but during that lecture, young Nancy Hopkins fell in love with the promise of genetics. Confidently believing science to be a pure meritocracy, she embarked on a career.

In 1999 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made the remarkable admission that it discriminated against women on its faculty, setting off a discussion about the need for more women at the top levels of science. The Exceptions is the untold story of the sixteen highly accomplished female scientists whose work convinced the university to acknowledge the problem and institute changes. Written by the journalist who broke the story in 1999 for The Boston Globe, it is an intimate narrative which centres on Nancy Hopkins.

Boiling Mad is Kate Zernike's eye-opening look inside the Tea Party, introducing us to a cast of unlikely activists and the philosophy that animates them. She shows how the Tea Party movement emerged from an unusual alliance of young Internet-savvy conservatives and older people alarmed at a country they no longer recognize. The movement is the latest manifestation of a long history of conservative discontent in America, breeding on a distrust of government that is older than the nation itself.