Carl Zimmer is a columnist for the New York Times. He began his career at Discover, where he served as a senior editor from 1994 to 1998. Since then he has published a dozen books, including Parasite Rex and Evolution: Making sense of life, and he has written hundreds of articles for the New York Times and magazines such as National Geographic, the Atlantic and Scientific American. In 2003 he started a blog called The Loom, which is now hosted by National Geographic. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.