Wired columnist to discuss ‘Farming, Antibiotics and the Future of Meat’

Maryn McKenna, ideas columnist at Wired and senior fellow at Brandeis’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, will speak at Yale on Tuesday, March 27, as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.

McKenna’s talk, “Farming, Antibiotics and the Future of Meat,” will take place at 4 p.m. in Rm. 102 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St. It is free and open to the public. McKenna’s visit is co-sponsored by the MB&B Undergraduate Program and the Yale Sustainable Food Program.

McKenna is an independent journalist focusing on public health, global health, and food policy. Her 2017 book, “Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats,” was named a best book of the year by Amazon, Smithsonian, and other publications. She has published two other books, both of which are about epidemics.

McKenna has reported from the field about epidemics, natural disasters, farming, and food production. Her 2015 TED Talk — “What do we do when antibiotics don’t work anymore?” — has been viewed over a million times and translated into 32 languages. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Scientific American, among other publications. As a newspaper reporter, she worked for 10 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she covered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism was established by Nelson Poynter, who received his master’s degree in 1927 from Yale. The fellowship brings to campus journalists from a wide variety of outlets who have made significant contributions to their field. Among recent Poynter fellows are Alison Snyder, Dan Diamond, and Bernard Avishai.