About Me

Born in Russia, Lina Zeldovich grew up in a family of Jewish scientists, listening to bedtime stories about volcanoes and black holes. As a child, she watched her grandfather fertilize the family’s organic orchard with composted sewage and thought that the whole world did the same. Now a prominent writer, editor and Columbia Journalism School alumna, she has written about ecology, health and sustainability for major publications in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, including The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Popular Science, and has appeared on radio and television. Having won four awards for covering the science of poo, she focused her book on the novel solutions to the world’s oldest problem—keeping humans free from their own excrement. In writing The Other Dark Matter, she toured a slew of smelly sewage plants, hopped over many stinky street gutters, stuck her nose into a stool bank—and lived to tell the story. When she isn’t digging into humanure in India, Madagascar, Kenya, or North America, she lives in New York City and tends to a compost pile in her backyard, just like she did with her grandfather years ago