John Horgan

JOHN HORGAN is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. A former senior writer at Scientific American (1986-1997), he has also written for The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Discover, The London Times, The Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, and other publications around the world. He writes regular columns for Scientific American online and BBC Knowledge Magazine (see links at left). He tweets under the tag Horganism (https:/​/​twitter.com/​#!/​Horganism).

Horgan's most recent book is The End of War, published in 2012 by McSweeney's Books (and now available as an e-book). The book has been called "the best book I've read in a very long time" (journalist David Swanson), "thoughtful, unflappable, closely argued" (novelist Nicholson Baker), "heartfelt and important" (evolutionary psychologist David Barash in The Chronicle of Higher Education). In The Philadelphia Inquirer, the political scientist Michael Horowitz wrote: "Dialogue like that Horgan has opened here, in my opinion, is where the best pragmatic solutions [to war] are likely to emerge."

Horgan has discussed the book on NPR, MSNBC and Voice of America, among other media outlets, and he has given talks at Columbia, NYU, Rutgers and other universities. MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan called The End of War one of his "six favorite books." See "Appearances" page for information on book-related events.

Horgan's other books include Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality, Houghton Mifflin, 2003, which The New York Times called "marvelous" and the Globe and Mail "splendidly written" (see outtakes from the book posted on this site); The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, Broadway Books, 1996, a U.S. bestseller translated into 13 languages; and its followup The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation, Free Press, 1999, which was a finalist for the 2000 British Mind Book of the Year and has been translated into eight languages.

He is the co-author with the Reverend Frank Geer of Where Was God on September 11?, edited by Robert Hutchinson, Brown Trout, 2002. He contributed essays to Within the Stone, a collection of photographs of mineral cross sections by Bill Atkinson, one of the creators of the original MacIntosh computer.

His publications have received international coverage, including front-page reviews and news articles in The New York Times, London Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. He has been interviewed hundreds of times for print, radio, and television media, including The Lehrer News Hour, Charlie Rose, and National Public Radio's Science Friday. He has lectured and participated in debates with prominent scientists and journalists before dozens of institutions in North America and Europe, including MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Dartmouth, McGill, the University of Amsterdam, and England's National Physical Laboratory.

His awards include the 2005 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion; the American Psychiatric Association Certificate of Commendation for Outstanding Reporting on Psychiatric Issues (1997); the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992 and 1994); and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award (1993). His articles have been selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Horgan was an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum, the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, from 1983 to 1986. He received a B.A. in English from Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1982 and an M.S. from Columbia's School of Journalism in 1983.