The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025 is a well curated collection of essays and articles from the world of science from 2024/25 edited by Susan Orlean. Released 21st Oct 2025 by HarperCollins on their Mariner Books imprint, it's 304 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.
This is an interesting and very well rounded anthology full of layman accessible popular science articles. The selection is impressively broad, generally eschewing the most popular periodicals with the largest reach in favor of the lesser known and potentially overlooked authors and subjects. Although the NYT and The Atlantic have entries here, so also do Orion, STAT, and Hippocampus.
There is a lot of content devoted (rightfully) to the dystopian loss of habitat and climate change, but I was gratified to see that not -all- the articles were strictly bad news; there are a broad selection of essays on scientific innovation and developing gene therapies and getting them to market, worms, color perception, and many more (20+ by my rough count). All of them were well written and engaging.
There is also an erudite and well written introduction by the guest editor, Ms. Orlean as well as a foreword by series editor Jaime Green.
Five stars. Accessible and interesting. Recommended for fans of science writing as well as a good choice for public or school library acquisition. Impressively egalitarian vetting and choice of material included. Lots of fodder for dinner table conversation to be found here... "I was reading about that just the other day...".
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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