5.5 x 8.25 inches

154 pages

8 b&w illustrations

ISBN  978-1-949597-09-7

Few of us really understand science. Even fewer can explain it to others. That’s the job of a science writer, who is supposed to be a paragon of rational thinking.

But what does it actually feel like to be a science writer? John Horgan, author of the bestseller The End of Science and other books, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science, an illustrated, stream-of-consciousness account of a day in his life.

This work of fact-based fiction follows Horgan’s alter ego, Eamon Toole, a blogger, college professor and divorced father, as he wakes up, meditates with the mantra “Duh,” commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a class on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch and takes a ferry to Manhattan to meet his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, “Emily,” on whom he plans to spring a big question.

Throughout the action of this one single day, Toole struggles to maintain a scientific mindset in the midst of his fears and yearnings. Thoughts of loving and dying keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity and the possibility of free will.

Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth.

John Horgan is an award-winning science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, a U.S. bestseller translated into thirteen languages; The Undiscovered Mind; Rational Mysticism; The End of War and Mind-Body Problems. Horgan has written for The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and National Geographic. He writes a popular column for Scientific American and produces "Mind-Body Problems" for the online talk show Bloggingheads.tv.

Praise for John Horgan

“Intellectually bracing, sweepingly reported, often brilliant... [John Horgan] is too impressive and entertaining to ignore.” —Natalie Angier, New York Times, on The End of Science.

“Being in Horgan’s company is to travel with a curious and cynical soul as he bumps entertainingly around the current landscape of mind science.” —John McCrone, The Guardian, on The Undiscovered Mind.

“[Horgan] is not your typical milquetoasty science writer.” Dick Teresi, —New York Times, on Rational Mysticism.