Presented by the Povich Journalism Program
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MARA HVISTENDAHL is a Beijing-based correspondent for Science. Her first book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, is a captivating and at turns sinister technological history that examines not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies underlying sex selection but also the West's role in creating them. The process of writing Unnatural Selection took Mara Hvistendahl everywhere from China to Albania in a compelling investigation of sex-selective abortion trends. Her award-winning writing has also appeared in Harper's, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy. Hvistendahl's deliberate reading was peppered with emotive pauses and glances at the audience, members of which provided ample questions in a follow-up session: among other topics, LGBT trends in effected countries, the value of women, and how to go from Paul Hendrickson's class to writing books were addressed. Proficient in both Spanish and Chinese, she has spent half of the past decade in China, where she has reported on everything from archaeology to the space program. A former contributing editor at Seed magazine and journalism professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, Hvistendahl sits on the advisory board of Round Earth Media, an organization founded to promote international journalism.
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