John Steele spent forty years in broadcast news — CBS, NBC, producing for PBS's Nova — before he decided that popular science journalism was broken. The problem, as he saw it, was not a shortage of discoveries but a shortage of storytelling. In 2013, armed with a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he launched Nautilus from New York with one guiding principle: if you want to grab somebody, just tell them a good story.
The format was unusual from the start. Each issue organized itself around a single big question — What Makes Genius? What Is Time? What Is Consciousness? — and invited scientists, philosophers, historians, and writers to circle that question from every conceivable angle. Steven Pinker might appear alongside a graphic novelist; a cosmologist's essay might neighbor a piece of literary fiction. Nautilus became the first magazine in history to win two National Magazine Awards in its first year of eligibility, and articles began appearing regularly in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.
The road was not always smooth. In 2017, twenty freelancers published an open letter alleging $50,000 in unpaid invoices — a crisis Steele publicly took responsibility for, attributing it to grant renewals that fell through. In 2019, the magazine was acquired by an ownership group of self-described "super-fans" that included Larry Summers, entrepreneur Ben Lamm, and Harvard literature professor Elisa New, who pledged to take no profit until every writer was paid in full.
Nautilus survives because it fills a space nothing else occupies: too literary for the lab, too rigorous for the coffee table, and too beautifully illustrated for either. It treats science the way Steele always believed it should be treated — as the grandest story humanity has ever tried to tell.
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