A rubber duck or a rubber duckie is a toy shaped like a duck, that is usually yellow with a flat base. It may be made of rubber or rubber-like material such as vinyl plastic. Rubber ducks were invented in the late 1800s when it became possible to more easily shape rubber, and are believed to improve developmental skills in children during water play.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
David Quammen is an American writer focusing on science, nature, and travel. He is the author of fifteen books. Quammen's articles have appeared in Outside Magazine, National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals.
Nicholas Dawidoff is an American writer.
Friendly Floatees are plastic bath toys marketed by The First Years and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements. Ebbesmeyer studied the movements of a consignment of 28,800 Friendly Floatees—yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles, and green frogs—that were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, such as Hawaii. Others traveled over 27,000 kilometres (17,000 mi), floating over the site where the Titanic sank, and spent years frozen in Arctic ice before reaching the U.S. Eastern Seaboard as well as Irish and also British shores, fifteen years later, in 2007.
Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.
Alex Kotlowitz is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker. His 1991 book There Are No Children Here was a national bestseller and received the Christopher Award and Helen Bernstein Award. He is a two-time recipient of both the Peabody Award and the Dupont Award for journalism. He co-produced the 2011 documentary The Interrupters, based on his New York Times Magazine article, which received an Independent Spirit Award and Emmy Award.
Dan Fagin is an American journalist who specializes in environmental science. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his best-selling book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. Toms River also won the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the National Academies Communication Award, and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award of the Society of Environmental Journalists, among other literary prizes.
Donovan Hohn is an American author, essayist, and editor.
Ann Louise Bardach [A.L. Bardach] is an American journalist and non-fiction author. Bardach is best known for her work on Cuba and Miami and was called "the go-to journalist on all things Cuban and Miami," by the Columbia Journalism Review, having interviewed dozens of key players including Fidel Castro, sister Juanita Castro, anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, CIA and Watergate plumber E. Howard Hunt, anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch and CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was present for the assassination of Che Guevara.
Sheri Fink is an American journalist who writes about health, medicine and science.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) is a historical study of the Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book was widely acclaimed by critics.
The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism is an annual literary award for "a journalist whose work has brought public attention to important issues", awarded by the New York Public Library. It was established in 1987 in memory of journalist Helen Bernstein, and there is a cash award of $15,000.
The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction is awarded by PEN America biennially "to a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective and illuminating important contemporary issues which have been published in the United States during the previous two calendar years. It is intended that the winning book possess the qualities of intellectual rigor, perspicuity of expression, and stylistic elegance conspicuous in the writings of author and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose four dozen books and countless other publications continue to provide an important and incisive commentary on the American social, intellectual and political scene."
Nina Bernstein is an American journalist, best known for her New York Times reporting on social and legal issues, including coverage of immigration, child welfare and health care. In 21 years at the Times, from which she retired at the end of 2016, she was a metro reporter, a national correspondent and an investigative reporter.
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation is a 2013 non-fiction book by the American author Dan Fagin. It is about the dumping of industrial pollution by chemical companies including Ciba-Geigy, in Toms River, New Jersey, beginning in 1952 through the 1980s, and the epidemiological investigations of a cancer cluster that subsequently emerged there. The book won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the 2014 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the 2014 National Academies Communication Award.
Thank You for Your Service, written by the American journalist David Finkel, is the follow-up non-fiction book to The Good Soldiers, which chronicles the lives of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Baghdad during 2007 and 2008. With this sequel, Finkel examines the soldiers' lives back home in the United States as they struggle to readjust to family and civilian life. The book was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
