My guest on this episode is Dan Werb. Dan is an author, epidemiologist and policy analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and elsewhere. His first book, City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands, was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2019 and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction. He holds faculty appointments at the University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto, and was the inaugural winner of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse Avenir Award. He is also the recipient of a Traiblazer Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In addition to that, Dan is a musician and composer who has performed and recorded as part of various groups and has written music for film. 

Dan’s most recent book The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure, was published by Crown Publishing in 2022. That book won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize. In its starred review of the book, Publishers Weekly called The Invisible Siege “a page-turning and unsettling look at the history of coronaviruses” and a “unique and valuable addition to the expanding body of work on COVID-19.”

Dan and I talk about how his musical career does, and doesn’t, connect with his scientific one, about the accelerating threat from strange and destructive new viruses, and about why the joy of winning a major non-fiction book award lasted... about a day and a half.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.