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It's unexplainable. I'm know I'm Hassan Foud. Every month, Vox culture writer, Constance Grady interviews and author for the Vox Book Club.

And last month, she told me about this book they were reading. It's called When We Seize to Understand the World.

And it's gotten all kinds of attention. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award.

One of the times best books of 2021. It even made it onto Obama's book list.

The book is about a few different moments in the 20th century when new scientific ideas burst onto the scene.

Ideas like black holes, chemical weaponry, quantum theory that threw science into disarray.

It's about the scientists who came up with these ideas and their struggle with genius or madness.

These stories they've been told before. But according to Constance, the author found this really unusual approach.

A way of blending nonfiction and fiction in order to grapple with the unknown and unknowable parts of science.

So this week we're going to do something a little different.

I spoke with Constance about this book and the central question it grapples with.

How do we deal with the uncertainty of modern science?

Could fiction help us make sense of things that just don't seem to make sense?

Here's Constance.

So the book is called When We Seize to Understand the World. It's by Benjamin Labatoot.

He is a novelist. He lives in Chile. And he is not a scientist. But he's interested in really big, confusing ideas.

...