Some Super Charming Illustrated Answers to Urban Mysteries

Designer and illustrator Julia Rothman grew up on City Island, a small island at the top of the Bronx. “It’s like a mile and a half long and a mile wide," she tells me. "Everybody knows everybody. It’s like living in a small town in the middle of New York City."

These days, the co-editor of The Where, the Why, and the How—a new art-meets-science book in which 75 artists illustrate quirky, murky mysteries of science—lives in Brooklyn. Co-editors Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe, partners at the design firm Also, live in Chicago. This is their fanciful take on the science textbook of yore, and scientific illustration as art object: the questions, and their still-debated answers—supplied by researchers at the likes of the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Yale, and the National Institutes of Health—are brought to unusual, imaginative life by well-known artists and illustrators.