Chris Berdik
From Chris’s home page:
I’m a journalist who writes about science, health, technology, and education, including two books, Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World–And How We Can Take It Back, about the power of noise and soundscapes (Norton, May 2025) and Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations (Penguin, 2012), about the placebo effect in medical and non-medical contexts. Previously, I was a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly, a research editor at the investigative-journalism magazine, Mother Jones, and a senior writer covering science and medicine for Boston University’s daily news website and alumni magazine, Bostonia.
My freelance writing has appeared in Popular Science, Wired, New Scientist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon, Politico, Slate, the Boston Globe, High Country News, Virginia Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, Boston magazine, and the Daily Beast, among other outlets. While I specialize in magazine features, I’ve also written education-technology columns for The Hechinger Report, authored blog posts and reports for nonprofits such as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and edited articles for Harvard Public Health magazine.
I’ve been awarded reporting grants from the Pulitzer Center, the Solutions Journalism Network, and the Society of Environmental Journalists, a career development grant from the National Association of Science Writers, and a reporting fellowship from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
827: Chris Berdik: Scientific American loved his book Clamor (so did I)
Sound pollution is pollution. You know it’s been growing for your whole life with little sign of decreasing.
I wish I lived in a world with less sound pollution, but given that I do, I’d rather be aware and conscious of it than not know. Ignorance of how much sound was affecting me wasn’t blissful. Noise still affected me. Awareness enables me to act.
But it’s not what you think. More decibels doesn’t necessarily mean more annoying. Lower decibels doesn’t necessarily mean less. Just think of a whiny drone that sounds like a mosquito. I can hear an electric leaf blower as I’m typing these words and while it may be quieter than a two-stroke engine, it’s freaking annoying and I can’t tune it out.
Chris’s book Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back describes more about sound, noise, how they affect us, how our understanding of them change, and new industries developing on sound design. I start by sharing how just the first chapter of his book illuminated elements of sound I hadn’t thought of.
We cover in our conversation many of the topics his book does, not only the facts but the emotional and health responses, what we can do, what others are doing.