Oliver Morton

Oliver Morton writes about scientific and technological change and their effects on the ways of the world.

He is currently a senior editor overseeing long-form journalism at The Economist. He has previously worked as an editor at Nature and Wired. He has also contributed to a wide range of other publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Science, the New Yorker, National Geographic, The American Scholar and the Hollywood Reporter (but alas only once).

He is the author of four books: Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World (2002); Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (2007); The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (2015); and The Moon: A History for the Future (2019). They all deal with understanding and imagining planetary processes, climate change on Earth being foremost among them.

He is a trustee of The Degrees Initiative, an NGO that funds research into solar geoengineering in the global south.

He has a degree in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University, he is married to a poet and he loves* in Greenwich. Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named in his honour.

*This was a typo but I’m keeping it…