James Nestor

James Nestor is the award-winning science journalist who reminded the modern world how to breathe. Born in Tustin, California, and long based in San Francisco — where he lives, writes, and surfs — he built his career reporting for publications including Scientific American, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Outside, drawn always to the places where human potential and hard science collide. That fascination first took him deep underwater: his 2014 book Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves followed athletes who dive hundreds of feet on a single breath, and was a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. It was watching those freedivers transform their bodies through breath alone that planted the question that would consume his next decade: what else don't we know about breathing? The answer became Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020) — an international phenomenon that spent eighteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won the American Society of Journalists and Authors' Best General Nonfiction Book award, was a finalist for the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and has sold over three million copies in forty-four languages. To write it, Nestor travelled from ancient burial sites to Soviet-era laboratories, testing everything on his own body — including a notorious experiment in which he plugged his nose for ten days to document the damage mouth-breathing does. Along the way he investigated the hidden science behind ancient practices like pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo, showing that traditions thousands of years old anticipated what pulmonology is only now confirming: that how we inhale and exhale shapes our health, our minds, and our lives. Nestor has carried this message from Stanford Medical School to the United Nations and the World Health Organization's Global Classroom, and across dozens of programs from Fresh Air to Nightline. His core discovery is disarmingly simple — breathe through your nose, breathe slowly, exhale fully — and his gift is showing why something so ordinary is genuinely transformative. For anyone standing at the entrance to breathwork, wanting evidence before esoterica, James Nestor is the perfect first guide: a rigorous skeptic who went looking for what went wrong with the human breath, and came back with a lost art restored.