It’s my pleasure to welcome Betsy Mason as the newest person of LWON. Betsy is an award-winning freelance science journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a senior editor at Wired for many years, and she has won a lot of accolades, including the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman award for breaking news. She’s also been an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. You can read her full bio here.
I’m not even sure anymore when or where I first met Betsy, it feels like we’ve been friends forever. She is kind and funny and a supremely gifted editor and writer. Betsy wrote a beautiful book about maps (co-authored with Greg Miller), and in addition to freelance editing, she also writes frequently about animals. You can expect a lot of posts about cute critters.
She’s written about problem-solving skills in raccoons, a series of puzzles researchers presented to urban coyotes to study animal cognition and the possibility that spiders dream during their REM-like sleep. She has totally convinced me that jumping spiders are as adorable as dogs and has made me obsessed with trying to befriend my local scrub jays.
Welcome Betsy! We’re so glad you’re here.