Next level visionaries

Claudia Dreifus writes "Conversation with..." in the New York Times’ Tuesday science section. She is known internationally for her unusual interviews with scientists, policymakers, and international figures.

Dreifus is the author of Scientific Conversations: Interviews on Science from the New York Times (Times Books, 2002) and Interview (Seven Stories Press, 1999), a book of political and cultural interviews used by journalism programs worldwide.

Dreifus, who teaches Magazine Writing with an International Dateline, has filed stories from places as diverse as Central America, Northern Ireland, Burma, South Africa, Chile, and Puerto Rico. In her course, emphasis is placed on developing practical skills with real world applications. Using the diverse possibilities of New York City as a base, students are encouraged to develop the skills they will need to produce feature length reporting from international locales.

Her writing appears in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Newsweek, Smithsonian, AARP-The Magazine, and Scientific American. Once, long ago and on a planet faraway, she worked as a Playboy interviewer, as well as feature writer for Ms. Magazine. She has also been an interviewer, over the years, for every major New York City newspaper, including Newsday, the New York Post, and the NY Daily News. For the past eighteen years, she has been associated with the New York Times, first as a contributing writer to the Sunday Magazine and now in the same position in the Tuesday Science Times.

She recently published the best-selling non-fiction book, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It, co-authored with political scientist Andrew Hacker.