James Nestor

James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Outside, Scientific American, Dwell, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Men's Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and others. His 2020 nonfiction book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, was an international bestseller, debuting on the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times lists, and spent 18 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers in its first year of release.

Breath won the award for Best General Nonfiction Book of 2020 by the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Breath was translated into more than 35 languages in 2022.

Nestor has written essays and feature articles for Outside, Scientific American, Dwell, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Men's Journal, Surfer’s Journal, BBC, Reader’s Digest, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and others.

Although Nestor writes primarily about science, focusing on the human body’s potential, he never intended to make journalism his career. He began his professional life as a copywriter for the Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group in San Francisco. He later directed copy and editorial projects for NextMonet, a San Francisco-based startup that sold fine art online. He directed special projects at Limn Gallery, including the Limn Almanac and The City in China.

In the early 2000s, Nestor became a copywriter for a federally-funded education policy nonprofit foundation. Nestor described working at this agency as "the most Kafkaesque existence;” during this time, he took an interest in magazine journalism.

From 2008 to 2018, Nestor became a member of The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, a private community of working writers that included bestselling authors Mary Roach, Po Bronson, Julia Scheeres, Caroline Paul, Ethan Watters, Matthew Zapruder, and several others. Being surrounded by other writers “who actually worked, some even seemed almost to make a living at it” inspired Nestor to quit his full-time job to become a freelance magazine journalist.

By 2014, Nestor had published his first nonfiction book focused on the human connection to the ocean – mammalian diving reflex, electroreception, magnetoreception, and abiogenesis. The book, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves was released on June 24, 2014, and won several awards. Deep has been published in seven languages.

In 2017, Nestor began working with National Geographic Explorer and marine scientist David Gruber to research and try to understand cetacean communication. Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) was launched three years later. It is a nonprofit research group that develops and employs technologies such as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to one day crack interspecies communication. Project CETI was accepted as a TED Audacious Project in June 2020. Nestor’s TED X Marin talk about the project's inception, “Deep Dive: What we are learning from the language of whales,” has been viewed more than 278,000 times.

Nestor’s follow-up book to Deep was Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, released on May 26, 2020. Breath became an instant international bestseller and won several awards. Breath sold more than a million copies within a year of publication.

Nestor has appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Joe Rogan Show, ABC’s Nightline, CBS Morning News, Bulletproof, Coast to Coast AM, BBC World, and dozens of NPR programs. In addition, he has been invited to speak at Stanford University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Yale School of Medicine, the United Nations, and The Global Classroom, a charity and education organization delivered by Scarisbrick Hall School in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and supported by UNICEF, which is the “largest digital classroom in the world.”