Ed Yong (presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures)

Just as he did in his New York Times bestseller An Immense World, Ed Yong expands our perception of nature—this time by revealing the astonishing ways living things operate at different scales in Life Beyond Measure.
All around us, just beyond our awareness, life proceeds in astounding ways. A 100-ton blue whale swims easily across fathomless oceans, singing to fellow whales thousands of miles away. Alongside it a bacterium swims in a drop of seawater that is as vast to it as an ocean is to the whale. Hummingbirds are too speedy for us to follow, while plants move too languorously for us to perceive.
Every living thing operates at its own scale—the blend of size, range, pace, longevity, and influence that defines the contours and rhythms of a life. We tend to think of the human scale as life’s default. But in Life Beyond Measure, Ed Yong coaxes us from our medium-sized, medium-lived, medium-paced, moderately mobile range and introduces us to entirely new worlds, some that could fit between two grains of sand. Fireflies assemble their luminous chorus; a bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean; a pink, rubbery salamander the size of a forearm rarely moves at all; an ant colony develops a personality, and a host of other dazzling, disorienting entities expand our understanding of what life can be.
Mind-bending, exhilarating, funny, and profound, Life Beyond Measure is a call to cast off our human perspective, lose ourselves in the vastness and strangeness of nature, and, by doing so, discover how intimately connected to the rest of life we are.
Ed Yong is the author of two prize-winning New York Times bestsellers, An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. He won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award in 2021 for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. His work has appeared in many publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, and The New Yorker; he was also featured in three editions of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, which he then guest-edited in 2021. He regularly does talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Liz Neeley, founder of Liminal Creations, and his corgi, Typo. He is almost certainly looking at birds right now.
Tickets are available for in-person attendance or streaming options – starting at $10 for Pay What You Can!