Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace was alt-CDC before it was a Twitter handle. He blogs at Farming Pathogens and is the author of “Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science,” in which he presents research drawing lines between the economic model of corporate farming and the emergence of new, deadlier strains of influenza. In this episode, Wallace reads a favorite poem by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott (pictured above) and discusses the importance of questioning narratives that justify the status quo, in science and in life.

Later on, we check the Haiku Hotline for your poems about the sea, curated by the editors of Poets Reading the News. Transcriptions of this week’s featured listener poems are available here.

"The Sea is History," by Derek Walcott appears in the collection Selected Poems published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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