In her upcoming book The Great Indoors, GPSW alumna Emily Anthes, ’06, dives into how indoor spaces shape everything from our physical and mental well-being to our job performance, daily life choices, and even our relationships. To explore the impact of indoor architecture, Anthes takes readers from high-tech smart homes designed to monitor health to a prison built to boost mental health for inmates to an operating room created to minimize medical errors.

Deborah Blum, Director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, described The Great Indoors as “a journey into fascination, dismay, and the occasional jolt of pure wonder” while Geoff Manaugh, author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City, called the work “that rare book that remains both honest and optimistic about the problems we face, from pandemic disease to social isolation, and—even better—is ambitious enough to identify real potential for change surrounding us in the architecture of our daily lives.”

The Great Indoors will be released on June 23, 2020. You can head here to preorder.

Emily Anthes is also the author of Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, which won the 2014 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books and longlisted for the 2014 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. More recently, Anthes won a 2018 Gold Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “Why Can’t We Have the Male Pill?,” a feature story published in Bloomberg Businessweek that chronicles efforts to develop a male contraception pill. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, Nature, Slate, Scientific American, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. 

Congratulations on the new book, Emily. We can’t wait to read it.