NWPR Books

Last spring, what NBC fondly refers to as "America's First Family" went through a very public divorce. Ann Curry, who spent more than a decade as a news anchor on the Today show and less than a year as a host, was unexpectedly axed. "For all of you who saw me as a groundbreaker," Curry said with emotion in her last morning broadcast, "I'm sorry I couldn't carry the ball over the finish line. But man, I did try."

Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji was once approached by a reporter for an interview. When Banaji heard the name of the magazine the reporter was writing for, she declined the interview: She didn't think much of the magazine and believed it portrayed research in psychology inaccurately.

But then the reporter said something that made her reconsider, Banaji recalled: "She said, 'You know, I used to be a student at Yale when you were there, and even though I didn't take a course with you, I do remember hearing about your work.' "

Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at the UCLA Medical Center, coined the term "zoobiquity" to describe the idea of looking to animals and the doctors who care for them to better understand human health. Veterinary medicine had not been on her radar at all until about 10 years ago. That's when she was asked to join the medical advisory board for the Los Angeles Zoo and she began hearing about "congestive heart failure in a gorilla or leukemia in a rhinoceros or breast cancer in a tiger or a lion."