Why didn’t anyone think of this before? NYT Pulitzer Prize winning science reporter Amy Harmon follows evolution into a Florida classroom, “reporting the controversy” not by pinballing between talking heads but by watching a high school biology teacher work his way through new state standards on teaching evolution that he helped write. Harmon turns a potentially dull subject — who wants to sit through high school biology again? — into a compelling story by exploring the teacher’s anxieties and epiphanies as he tries to reach a skeptical creationist student. The rest of the class necessarily becomes a faceless chorus, but the gimmick develops narrative force as teacher and student approach understanding of — if not agreement with — one another. Harmon’s next assignment, if we were her editor: follow an Intelligent Design-inclined teacher through his or her unit on the development of life. She won’t have to look any further than down the hall, where one of the teacher’s colleagues teaches a unit called “Evolution or NOT,” leading students step by step to the conclusion that, as she says, “God did it.”