Charles Piller
speaker
984 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 17 Apr
Charles Piller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, honestly, I've had that a number of times. And it's not with every story because sometimes in this business, you drill a lot of holes and some of them are dry holes. But when you hit a gusher, you know this is something potentially important and interesting.
And that's really critical to remember because it doesn't do much good to do a lot of digging and find out information that is beneficial to the public if you can't make it something the public really is interested in and wants to learn about. And so, you know, what I look for in the, as you say, the sort of most exciting moment is when I have
both an interesting story and compelling story of some importance, but also a compelling way to tell it. And that's usually through the eyes of the people who have lived it. And that's what I'm about.
I'm about trying to find ways to tell stories that are interesting, that are compelling, that have a kind of arc that anyone could read and understand and kind of understand the relevance of it to their own lives. And that involves, for example, really, really getting to know people and getting them to trust you enough to tell their stories.
Sure. It's a good question, Dylan. Honestly, it's mostly the latter. It's just things that I get clued into and become deeply interested in over the course of it. I have to say the Alzheimer's situation is a little bit different for me. It is more personal in that, like Millions of Americans. I have personally experienced Alzheimer's disease in my family. So my mom passed away a few years ago.
She died with Alzheimer's disease and had terrible dementia towards the end of her life. My dad did not have Alzheimer's. He had a different dementia. one called Lewy Body Syndrome. It's something that is associated with Parkinson's disease.
So yes, for me, this book, this pursuit, this effort to try to expand knowledge about Alzheimer's disease is definitely personal for me and something that I feel that I owe to my family and to myself.
Well, my background initially was not in journalism. I studied psychology in school. And I very quickly realized that that was not going to be a profession for me, that I was... You know, as much as I respect and honor people who want to have a one-to-one relationship with patients and clients and help them work through their issues, I realized that that just, you know, that wasn't me.
That wasn't my personality. And my grandfather was a quite accomplished psychology researcher back in the day. And he, in a way, inspired me. But then I realized I had to be honest and true to my own interests and talents. And so... What happened was out of college, I went ahead and experimented with freelance writing.
And in fact, one of the first big articles I ever did was something that really sparked my interest in investigative reporting. It had to do with a group of workers in Utah who were working in a lead smelting plant. So this is a processing plant for lead. And this group of workers were exposed to terrible toxic fumes. And the company that they were working for had been covering it up.
And what I was able to do was to not just learn about some of the details of that toxic exposure, but to talk to some of the individual workers who were exposed. And this was quite a few years ago. There was no internet. And it was a bit of a challenge. And I used kind of a time-honored device.
old school method, which was to call from a small town in Utah, where it's not that everybody knows everybody, but people are deeply connected to each other. And I made some random calls, looked up people in the phone book and started calling people and said, do you know someone who works at this plant?
And within about three calls, I had some key sources to understand the depth of the problem there. And that gave me the sort of the bug, if you will, to try to do more in investigative reporting. I worked for newspapers for a while, small, very small newspapers, and then moved on to, uh, magazines.
And eventually, um, I broke through to a big newspaper job at the Los Angeles times where I did, uh, both, uh,
reporting on news subjects and also a lot of investigative reporting and really had the benefit of working with world-class colleagues and editors who were able to help me hone my skills and be even more ambitious and try to do things that required the teams that a big news organization can provide. And that kind of got me on my way, and I have never looked back from there.
Sure. Happy to do it. So Science Magazine is a scholarly journal, which is one of the hundreds, thousands of academic journals out there in the world that publish these kind of honestly, dense scientific articles with lots of references and a lot of technical terms. But it also has a journalism side of the magazine. So there's a scholarly article side and the journalism side.
And of course, I work for the journalism side of the book. And science is one of the most important and prestigious scholarly journals in the world. And so the benefit as a journalist of working there on scientific subjects is that my stories have the opportunity to have a lot of influence because the journal is so well respected, so well edited, and there's a trust factor.
The trust factor is that we know that if it's coming from this source, it's something that we know has been deeply researched and deeply reviewed by qualified people. And that, I think, is a leg up when you're talking about technical subjects that might challenge conventional wisdom about science, which is a lot of what I write about.
Yes. Yeah, that's a pretty accurate representation of it, Dylan. I would just say that the topics of Science Magazine are extremely broad, everything from astrophysics to, as you say, cellular biology or genetics. And the journalism side is equally broad. Now, we have news reporters who cover events within the scientific community, new developments, important studies that might break new ground.
And as you mentioned, science is an iterative process. It always is the next step in reaching a new plateau of knowledge, but it's almost never the final step of anything because there's always new knowledge to gain. And the scholarly journal tries to find those new things. And the journalism portion of the writes about their meaning and significance.
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