The New York Times and Me

The New York Times and Me

I used to write for the New York Times. It started in 1999 when they asked me to review three books on AI. They printed this review on the front page of the Book Review section and I received a lot of correspondence about it. This was quickly followed up by two other book reviews, culminating in a review of a book by Antonio Damasio called Looking for Spinoza, in which I criticized the book for being untrue and unoriginal (it advocated the James-Lange theory of emotion). Meanwhile they reviewed three books by me: The Mysterious Flame, The Making of a Philosopher, and The Power of Movies. I was also asked to write an op-ed about movies (it was Oscar time). All this ended in 2006 when I pointed out to the editors that the printed review of the movie book got the title of the book wrong and missed an obvious irony on my part. I have not been asked to review again and none of my later books have been reviewed by them. Don’t ask me why. (Later there was a rather inept article on you-know-what.) My guess is that they didn’t like the tone and content of my Damasio review and were embarrassed about the error in the review of my movies book. I never inquired and have since lost a lot of respect for that newspaper (the Book Review is hardly worth reading these days, though I still make an attempt).