John Rennie: Crazy Mail
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2014
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As an editor at Scientific American John Rennie delighted in the weird correspondence they received, but then one letter crossed a line. John Rennie is a science writer, editor, and lecturer based in New York. Viewers of The Weather Channel know him as the host of the original series Hacking The Planet and co-host of the hit special The Truth About Twisters. He is also the editorial director of science for McGraw-Hill Education, overseeing its highly respected AccessScience online reference and the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology. Rennie served as editor in chief of Scientific American (including the monthly magazine, Scientific American Mind, ScientificAmerican.com and other publications) between 1994 and 2009.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I felt... |
| 0:08.0 | ...and I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment... |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | ...theid... Hey everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:31.1 | We have shows coming up in Pittsburgh and San Francisco and a special show about science fiction at the 92Y as part of New York Superweek. |
| 0:38.2 | Check out storycollider.org for times and tickets. |
| 0:42.0 | This week's story is from John Rennie. |
| 0:44.0 | The story was recorded in September 2014 at the Bell House in Brooklyn. |
| 1:02.5 | The Good Good. Back at the end of 1989 was a very exciting time for me. |
| 1:05.6 | I was still just learning the ropes around Scientific American. |
| 1:10.4 | I had just started working there as one of the editors on staff a few months before. |
| 1:12.0 | So it was still possible for me to be surprised when I was walking past the desk of the administrative assistant for the |
| 1:19.5 | magazine, a lovely aristocratic, sometimes haughty woman named Adele. And I looked at her desk |
| 1:25.6 | and I was surprised by something that I saw there. |
| 1:29.1 | Now, mostly on her desk were lots of stacks of very ordinary business correspondence, |
| 1:34.5 | very ordinary business correspondence, reprints of different papers, manuscripts, |
| 1:40.4 | manila folders, the kind of things you would expect to find there. But there was one stack that was very, very different. |
| 1:47.3 | The papers making it up were lots of different odd shapes and textures, and it wasn't all |
... |
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