Author Talk: Thomas Levenson — A Pox on Fools - with Jennifer Ouellette
June 11, 2026
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Now PlayingAuthor Talk: Thomas Levenson — A Pox on Fools - with Jennifer Ouellette
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as posted by the channelWatch author Thomas Levenson discuss "A Pox on Fools" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
An urgent and profound history of vaccine skepticism, seeking to understand how our three most common fears about vaccines hardened into a lethal ideology—from a leading science writer
Searing but ultimately empathetic, A Pox on Fools explores the human impulse to question and wonder—sometimes past the point at which the very act of questioning turns deadly.
Thomas Levenson is a professor of science writing at MIT. He is the author of several books, including So Very Small, Money for Nothing, The Hunt for Vulcan, Einstein in Berlin, and Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist. He has also made ten feature-length documentaries (including a two-hour Nova program on Einstein) for which he has won numerous awards.
Levenson is joined in conversation with Jennifer Ouellette, a senior writer covering science and culture at Ars Technica. She has been writing professionally about physics and related topics for more than two decades, and was the founding director of the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange from 2008-2010. Her work has appeared in Discover, Slate, Smithsonian, Nature, Physics World, and Quanta, among other publications. She previously worked as science editor for Gizmodo, and is the author of four popular science books, most recently The Calculus Diaries (2010) and Me, Myself And Why (2014).
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