Category: books

NBC and the NYT appear to be duped by a discredited technique: facilitated communication

April 16, 2026 • 9:30 am

Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is the supposed ability of people who can’t speak and are severely handicapped to “communicate” by having a “helper” guide them in pointing out letters or words.  Wikipedia describes it this way:

Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique which claims to allow non-verbal people, such as those with autism, to communicate. The technique involves a facilitator guiding the disabled person’s arm or hand in an attempt to help them type on a keyboard or other such device that they are unable to properly use if unfacilitated.

There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board and dowsing rods.  Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object).  In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.

James Todd called facilitated communication “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities.”

And indeed, I thought FC had been discredited a long time ago. (I posted about it here in 2017 when the idea was used as an excuse for sexual assault.) But no, it’s reemerged with the publication of new bestselling novel, Upward Bound, touted by, among others, the New York Times, which lately has a real penchant for woo. The novel (#305 on the Amazon overall list today) has drawn huge attention because the author, 28 year old Woody Brown, is severely autistic and cannot speak. Yet he got a degree in English from UCLA followed by an MFA degree at Columbia, doing all assignments through a facilitator—his mother Mary.  She herself worked as a “story analyst for Hollywood studios.”

I’ve put a video below showing Brown “writing” by pointing at a letter board held by his mother, who then interprets the pointing. It’s not convincing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel is below (screenshot goes to publisher).

And yes, the NYT appears to have bought the whole thing, assuming that Woody actually wrote the novel. Read their article by clicking below, or finding the piece archived here).

A couple of excerpts from the NYT:

Woody Brown knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 8 years old. Around that age, he made up stories about his alter ego, Cop Woody, a hero who went around saving people.

The tales stunned his mother, Mary Brown. She’d been reading to him since he was a baby, but never imagined that he could create his own elaborate plots.

As a toddler, Woody was diagnosed with severe autism. Doctors concluded he couldn’t process language, and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. Whenever Woody spoke, it sounded like shrieks and gibberish.

But Mary came to realize that her son understood more than he appeared to. He would become hysterical if they deviated from their daily routine, but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at McDonalds, he would calmly follow her into the store. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at letters to spell out words, using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary’s questions, first with single-word answers, and later with short sentences. When he started spelling out his Cop Woody stories, Mary recognized some of the plots, which were lifted from the headlines. Woody had been following the news on the TV and radio.

“That’s how Mom figured out that I was listening to everything,” Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents’ home in Monrovia, Calif., where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his finger taps and repeated the words aloud.

When he learned to communicate by spelling, it felt like an escape hatch had opened, Woody explained.

“Miraculous discovery,” he spelled. “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open — left ajar, not flung wide, because the majority of people still doubted me.”

. . .While not strictly autobiographical, the stories in “Upward Bound” are shaped by Woody’s experience. He describes the agony of being unable to share his thoughts or control his verbal and physical tics, and the frustration of being underestimated by people who look at him and see an uncomprehending, mentally disabled person.

“I wanted to reach neurotypical readers, the well intentioned people who don’t realize that we are the same inside,” Woody explained. “I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person. I just present a little differently.”

The author of the piece, Alexandra Alter, visited Woody and his mom, and describes the interview as if Woody himself were answering her questions by pointing at the letterboard. The only reference to the possibility that it’s Mary rather than Woody who is speaking is this:

Some of the communication methods Mukhopadhyay teaches have drawn criticism from language experts who argue that the person holding the board might be influencing or misinterpreting comments from a disabled person. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association doesn’t recommend the method, and put out a statement in 2019 warning that the resulting words might not reflect the disabled person’s intentions.

There are also skeptics who doubt someone as severely autistic as Woody can form and express sophisticated thoughts, much less write a novel.

Mary said she isn’t surprised some people question Woody’s abilities — it took her years to recognize what he was capable of. But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.

“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.

Mary has also faced questions over whether she’s influencing or shaping Woody’s writing, which she insists she isn’t. When Woody is conversing, his finger flies across the board, but when he’s writing, Mary makes him spell out each word slowly. He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys, and the time spent fixing typos makes him lose focus.

That’s the only reference in this long, glowing article to the possibility of facilitated communication, and there is no reference to the long, sad history of FC—a history that has made investigators almost universally say that it’s the facilitator and not the disabled person who is doing the “speaking.” (For a free Frontline documentary showing this, go here.)

Now it’s time for you to see Woody communicate. This video comes from NBC’s Today show, and Woody’s novel is breathlessly pronounced “deeply heartfelt and moving” and “authentic” by Jenna Bush Hager (W.’s daughter). Pay attention to the pointing by Woody and interpretation by Mary.  Seriously, I cannot see at all a string of meaningful words.

As one correspondent wrote, “[Woody] is frequently not looking at the board while pointing, AND, when they show what he’s pointing to, it doesn’t correspond at all to actual words. I’m actually blown away that they showed this so clearly.” Indeed!  Didn’t NBC get a bit dubious about this, much less the NYT, whose reporter saw the same thing?  All I can say is that if this is really facilitated communication from Woody, it would be the first real facilitated communication ever documented. But it wasn’t tested, as they did no test on Woody. (They could, example, test his abilities by having Mary interpret things that only Woody knows, or using another facilitator.)  Has Jenna even heard of facilitated communication?

Now I’m not ruling this out as authentic communication, but the demonstration above doesn’t increase my priors. Shame on the NBC for buying this without doubts.

Fortunately, at least two people wonder if Woody’s novel is his own composition or Mary’s. The first is Daniel Engber at the Atlantic, who wrote the critical article below (archived here if it’s paywalled).

Engber watched the NBC clip, and says this:

But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.

Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”

On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”

Of course there is a strong desire by Mary, and all facilitated communicators, to believe that they’re merely translating someone else’s thoughts—all the more reason to do appropriate tests and controls.

More from Engber

I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:

It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.

Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.

By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.

But wait, another fan of pseudoscience likes it! Yep, it’s RFK, Jr.:

ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.

Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.

Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”

. . . The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA’s statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”

It’s always unwise to take something on faith, particularly something that has been previously discredited and whose present instantiation can be tested but wasn’t. Although Engber likes the book and recommends it, he’s dubious about authorship.  Likewise, I am not willing to accept Woody Brown as the author.

Neither is Freddie deBoer in the article he recently put up. Its title tells the tale (click to read):

deBoer is even more skeptical than Engber:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.

The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests…. This is the inconvenient, damning reality.

So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling,” which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.

The Times article never grapples with the evidence. Instead, it substitutes anecdote for science: the mother “realized” her son understood more than expected; the facilitator “saw tension evaporate.” But these are precisely the kinds of subjective impressions that controlled studies were designed to test and, where appropriate, falsify. The best we get from the review’s author, Alexandra Alter, as far as an acknowledgement of FC’s discredited reality lies in these paragraphs:

It goes on, but you get the points: Woody is likely not composing anything himself, the writing is probably due to his mother, the NYT and NBC are uber-credulous, and the buying public, eager to embrace woo and a feel-good story, is making the book a best seller. Oh, and this credulous acceptance of a method discredited for years is harmful to autistic people, to science, and to reason as a whole.’

deBoer spends a lot of space attacking the NYT, as he’s done in the past, but he does give some insight into why the paper is touting FC so hard:

As with so many recent bad publicshing decisions, rehabilitating FC reflects the paper’s increasing dependence on a subscriber-driven business model, where maintaining the sensibilities and emotional investments of its core readership – affluent brownstone liberals who would prefer the pleasant version of reality, thanks – often takes precedence over adversarial truth-telling. In an earlier era, when advertising and broad retail circulation were more central to its finances, the Times had greater latitude to challenge its most dedicated audience. Today, with digital subscribers a) the dominant revenue base and b) heavily drawn from demographics that are highly educated, high income, and progressive-leaning, there’s a clear incentive not to alienate a readership that is drawn to narratives of underdog triumphs and redemptive uplift. Facilitated communication fits neatly into that worldview, offering a reassuring story about disability that flatters the moral intuitions of well-meaning readers while sidestepping the far more difficult reality. The result is a kind of audience capture that encourages credulity precisely where skepticism is most needed. Who wants to read a downer story about genuinely non-verbal, deeply disabled people on their phone while they ride the 4 train uptown to take Kayleigh to her $20,000/year dance lessons?

This may well explain the Times‘s recent touting of religion, whose factual claims could also be seen as pseudoscientific (indeed, Ross Douthat’s evidence for God, presented in the NYT, is based on science).  It does no harm to criticize religion, for the NYT subscribers are likely soft on it. If they’re not believers, they’re “believers in belief”: people who aren’t themselves religious but see faith as an essential social glue essential for “the little people” who hold society together.But Ceiling Cat help you if you promote nonbelief!

h/t: Greg

Addendum by Greg Mayer

The Times just went deeper into the FC morass. The columnist Frank Bruni, who should know better– he’s a professor at Duke, fer chrissakes– just went all in on the dubious book:
Let’s leave readers with a happier thought. I’m reading a novel, “Upward Bound,” written by a young man named Woody Brown who was diagnosed with severe autism as a child and thought to be incapable of sophisticated communication. He still struggles with speech, as our Times colleague Alexandra Alter explained in an excellent recent profile of him. But he’s an effective writer, complaining in “Upward Bound” about caretakers’ tendency to let their autistic charges idle “as if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.” His book takes readers inside the thoughts of someone like him. And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. Tapping letters on a board to spell out his answers to Alexandra’s questions, he told her: “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open.” Now he’s free — and he’s flying.
It’s in his weekly dialogue with Bret Stephens. While Stephens didn’t endorse FC, any sane journalist would have pushed back, so his silence on it in the column is a black mark on him, as well. If you want to see how FC works, watch the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence” (available free here), which thoroughly debunked FC– in 1992! When I taught a course on “Science & Pseudoscience”, I used to show this to the class, because it shows how pseudosciences work, how they are evangelized, how their proponents reject criticism by employing well-known hedges and dodges, and the harm they can do.

An evolutionary biologist lists and discusses the ten most influential books in the field

April 7, 2026 • 11:00 am

I would have missed this video had reader Doug not called my attention to it. It’s a very good half-hour discussion by evolutionary biologist Zach B. Hancock, a professor at Augusta University, in which he recommends the the top ten most influential books in evolutionary biology. Since Hancock is a population geneticist, the books deal largely with evolutionary genetics, but not all of them.

I slipped in at #10 with my book on Speciation with Allen Orr, but I won’t be too humble to claim our book wasn’t influential, for, as Hancock notes, it’s the only comprehensive book on the origin of species around. (Darwin’s big 1859 book was about the origin of adaptations, and had little that was useful about the origin of species.) Hancock regrets that Allen and I aren’t going to do a second edition, but Allen refuses to, and I don’t have the spoons (I do have 200 pages of notes on relevant papers that appeared after our book came out, but that will go nowhere.)

The rest of the list is stellar, and shows a keen judgement about the field. I’m not sure I would have put Lack’s book on the Galápagos finches in there, as it’s pretty much out of date. It should be replaced by a very important book by Ernst Mayr, his Systematics and the Origin of Species or the updated version in 1963,  Animal Species and Evolution. It was Mayr who codified the Biological Species Concept and paved the way for experimental and observational studies of speciation, and hence my book with Orr. 

I’d expect every graduate student in evolutionary genetics to have read  most of these books by the time they get their Ph.D. In fact, when I was on prelim hearings, judging whether students could be admitted to candidacy after a year or two, I and my colleague Doug Schemske made a habit of asking students to name the major accomplishments of several of the authors listed below. My impression is that the history of the field is not given so much weight now, so I wonder if students could still explain the major accomplishments of say, Theodosius Dobzhansky or Ronald Fisher. The books are of more than historical interest, for they raise questions that are still relevant. (I spent a lot of my career trying to understand the phenomenon of “Haldane’s Rule,” explained by J.B.S. Haldane in 1922. The paper was completely neglected until I read it in the early eighties and started a cottage industry of explanations [my own was largely wrong]).

Hancock’s explication of each book is excellent.  If you’re an academic teaching evolutionary biology, you might see how many of these books your students have read.

One commenter on YouTube gave the list and the time points in the video where each is discussed (the links go to those time point).

2:26 #10 Speciation – Jerry Coyne & Allen Orr
4:50 #9 Darwin’s Finches – David Lack
6:59#8 Evolution: The Modern Synthesis – Julian Huxley
9:15 #7 The Origins Of Genome Architecture – Michael Lynch
11:23 #6 Chance & Necessity – Jacques Monod
13:26 #5 The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
16:54 #4 The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution – Motoo Kimura
19:34 #3 Genetics and the Origin of Species – Theodosius Dobzhansky
22:20 #2 The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection – Ronald Fisher
26:35 #1 On The Origin Of Species – Charles Darwin

The ten best-selling books in history, and what I’m reading

March 31, 2026 • 8:15 am

I think the site below was suggested to me by Facebook, but at any rate one can subscribe for free. It’s called 1000 Libraries Magazine, and it specializes in news about books, which of course interests me.  Here, for example, is one of their latest articles whose title was catnip for me (click to read; you may have to give them your email and subscribe):

Now of course everybody knows at least one of these: the Bible. But can you guess the others? Some are obvious when you think about it, but others are not. I’ll list the top ten giving the number of copies estimated to have been sold. Text from the site is indented. I’ll also tell you if I’ve read them (total read: 8/10).

1.)  The Bible. 5 billion copies sold. 

Sitting firmly at the top, and likely forever unchallenged, is The Bible. With an estimated 5 billion copies sold, it’s the most distributed and translated book in human history.

What makes this even more remarkable is how it spread. Long before modern publishing, social media, or mass literacy. The Bible has been translated into over 3,000 languages, carried across continents by missionaries, scholars, and believers, and printed continuously for centuries.

I read this when I was writing Faith Versus Fact. It was a tedious exercise, and assertions that it’s a great work of literature are bogus. Parts of it are good, yes, but I always say that if there was only one copy of the book, sitting in a dusty “reduced price” bin somewhere, critics would claim it is boring—which it is.  Try reading how the Ark was constructed near the beginning!  It is considered a great work of literature only because it was influential, not because it was good. However, the King James translators did do a good job on the translation.

2.) The Little Red Book. 1.1 billion copies sold. 

This one surprises many people. Officially titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, The Little Red Book reached 1.1 billion copies sold, largely during China’s Cultural Revolution.

It wasn’t sold in the traditional sense. It was distributed, required reading, and a political tool. At one point, owning a copy wasn’t optional; it was a social expectation.

I haven’t read it.

3.) The Qur’an.  800 million copies sold. 

As the central religious text of Islam, the Quran has sold an estimated 800 million copies worldwide.

Muslims believe it to be the literal word of God, revealed in Arabic, which is why translations are often considered interpretations rather than replacements. Like the Bible, it’s recited, memorized, studied, and revered, not just read once and shelved.

Yes, I read it, also when writing Faith Versus Fact. It’s not only boring like the Bible, but filled with more animosity, bellicosity, and hatred than you can imagine. I was surprised that so few copies were sold: there are nearly as many Muslims as there are Christians on the planet, but their sacred book has sold less than 20% as much as the Bible.

4.) The Bhagavad Gita. 503 million copies sold. 

Part philosophy, part spiritual guide, part epic dialogue, The Bhagavad Gita has sold over 503 million copies.

Embedded within the Indian epic Mahabharata, this relatively short text explores duty, morality, devotion, and the nature of life itself. It has inspired thinkers from Mahatma Gandhi to modern self-help writers.

Yes, I read this, but simply because it was touted as a work of philosophy and because it had a big influence on India, a country I love. I thought it was definitely worth reading. I have not read the entire Mahabarata.

Robert Oppenheimer certainly read at least the Bhagavad Gita (and in the original Sanskrit!), for he gave a famous quote from it when the atomic bomb was successfully tested in New Mexico. Here’s what he said to NBC in 1965:

“I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu [a principal Hindu deity] is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds’. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

5.) Don Quixote. 5oo million copies sold.

Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote has galloped its way to 500 million copies sold since its publication in 1605.

Written by Miguel de Cervantes, this satirical tale of a delusional knight tilting at windmills is hilarious, tragic, and surprisingly modern. It pokes fun at idealism while also celebrating imagination, a tricky balance Cervantes somehow nailed, even way back then.

Yep, I’ve read it, and found it good but not great. My bad.

6.) A Tale of Two Cities. 200 million copies sold. 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and apparently, it was also one of the most read. Set during the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities has sold 200 million copies, making it Charles Dickens’ bestselling novel.

Yes, I read it, but think there are better works by Dickens, like Bleak House or David Copperfield.

7.) The Little Prince.  200 million copies sold. 

The Little Prince has sold 200 million copies and remains one of the most translated works ever written. On the surface, it’s a children’s story. Underneath, it’s a poetic meditation on love, loneliness, and what really matters.

It’s the kind of book people reread at different stages of life, and somehow find something new each time.

Yes, I read it—twice, once when younger and once when I was over 40.  I didn’t find much new the second time, and thought it was sappy. Sue me.

8.) The Book of Mormon. 190 million copies sold.

With 190 million copies sold, The Book of Mormon stands as another major religious text with global reach.

Published in 1830, it forms the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its distribution has been driven largely by missionary efforts, making it one of the most actively shared books in modern history.

Yep, I read it, again while writing Faith Versus Fact. It’s a straight ripoff of the Bible, confected not by God but by Joseph Smith, who apparently loved the phrase, “And so it came to pass.” The only part worth reading are the two “testimonies” at the beginning, with 11 people swearing that they actually saw the golden plates. They were all lying. Here’s the second testimony (you can see the whole book here).  Given the fraudlent way the book came to be, I always question the credibility of Mormons who think it’s true.

9.) The Lord of the Rings. 155 million copies sold.

One epic fantasy, three volumes, and 155 million copies sold.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga didn’t just entertain readers; it redefined fantasy as a genre. Elves, hobbits, detailed world-building, invented languages… all roads lead back to The Lord of the Rings.

Of course I’ve read it—who hasn’t?  I watched part of one of the movies, and was not engaged, since I had the scenery and the characters in my mind from reading the book, and the movie didn’t match, though Gollum was good.  The Hobbit is also an essential part of the Tolkien experience. You have to admire Tolkien for creating an entire fantasy world, complete with its own language—all while he was a professor.

10.) The Alchemist. 150 million copies sold.

Rounding out the list is The Alchemist, with 150 million copies sold. It stands as proof that modern books can still join legendary company.

Paulo Coelho’s spiritual fable about following your dreams resonates across cultures and ages. It’s short, simple, and endlessly quotable, a book people gift, recommend, and return to when they’re feeling lost.

This, along with The Little Red Book, is one of the two out of ten that I haven’t read. In fact, I haven’t even heard of it until now, though it was published in 1988, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here’s part of what I read:

The Alchemist (Portuguese: O Alquimista) is a novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho which was first published in 1988. Originally written in Portuguese, it became a widely translated international bestseller. The story follows Santiago, a shepherd boy, in his journey across North Africa to the Egyptian pyramids after he dreams of finding treasure there. It has since been translated into more than 65 languages and has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.  In 2009, Paulo Coelho was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s most translated living author.

. . . The book’s main theme is about finding one’s destiny, although according to The New York Times, The Alchemist is “more self-help than literature”. The advice given to Santiago that “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true” is the core of the novel’s thinking. Coelho originally wrote The Alchemist in only two weeks, explaining later that he was able to work at this pace because the story was “already written in [his] soul.”

The NYT take, archived, is here. where Will Smith, who likes the book, calls it “real metaphysical, esoteric nonsense.”  I don’t think I’ll be reading it: life is too short. But if you have read it, weigh in below. The author must be bloody rich!

I’ve recently finished three books, all recommended by my erstwhile editor at Viking Penguin, who knows her books. I enjoyed them all, and I’m reading another book now in preparation for travel (the last below):

We Don’t Know Ourselves:  A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, published in 2021 Fintan O’Toole. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be engrossed by a history of modern Ireland, but this book did the job. O’Toole, a respected Irish journalist and drama critic, decided to recount the modern history of Ireland from the year he was born up to the time of publication, with each chapter encompassing a period of time.  As I said, I really liked the book and learned a ton, especially about the entangled and convoluted history of the Catholic Church and Irish politics during this period.  Even in O’Toole’s youth and young manhood, the Church was enslaving children and unwed pregnant mothers, engaging in financial misdealings with the government, and oppressing the Irish (condoms were legalized only for married people in 1979, and for the unmarried in 1985; while abortions were illegal until just seven years ago).  That the Irish came through all this shows their resilience.

Empire of the Sun, published in 1984 novel by the English writer J. G. Ballard. This is a “fictionalized biography” based on Ballard’s experiences as a youth in China when he was separated from his parents and interred in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai for some years.  The resourcefulness of Ballard, insofar as his depiction is true, is amazing, and the book engrossing. I gather that it was turned into a very successful 1987 film with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard and directed by Stephen Spielberg. You can’t do better than that pair. I must see the movie. However, I found I have a bit of a problem with biography turned into fiction, as I get distracted trying to separate truth from imagination.  I should just let that endeavor go, but it somehow interrupts my reading.

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, published in 1982. Ondaatje wrote the Booker-Prize-winning novel The English Patient, while Running in the Family is a somewhat fictionalized memoir of his youth in Sri Lanka and of two subsequent visits he made there as an adult. It seems to be more truthful than the two books above in terms of recounting what happened, and the characters are surely somewhat accurate, though bizarre. It suffers a bit in talking about only the rich, English-associated people of the country, so one doesn’t learn anything about the Sri Lankans (then “Sinhalese”) themselves. But as a portrait of upper-class “colonialist” life in the country it is colorful and absorbing.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (1994).  I am visiting Savannah in mid-April with some old friends, and was told to read this book as preparation. It’s another “nonfiction novel,” about which Wikipedia says this:

The book’s plot is based on real-life events that occurred in the 1980s and is classified as non-fiction. Because it reads like a novel (and rearranges the sequence of true events in time), it is sometimes referred to as a “non-fiction novel.”

The characters are unbelievably colorful and eccentric, but they were apparently like that in real life. So far I’ve read about 120 pages and haven’t gotten into the main plot, but already the setting has made me eager to go to a renowned and beautiful city that I’ve never visited.

This of course is also a prompt for readers to let us know what they’ve read lately, and whether they liked it (I get a lot of suggestions from such comments). Your turn.

Alex Byrne recounts an episode of professional rejection involving yet another academic taboo

March 20, 2026 • 11:30 am

Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Alex Byrne (a professor at MIT who works in part on gender and sex), has written a tale of rejection that’s both amusing (in how it’s written) and depressing (in what it says).

Alex was invited to write a book review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an online site that publishes only reviews of philosophy books. Because reviews are invited (sometimes after a prospective reviewer offers to write one), they are rarely if ever rejected.

But not so with Byrne. Because he wrote a critical but not nasty review of a book on gender by a trans-identified male, Alex’s contribution was rejected—without the site even giving him an explanation.

Click the screenshot below to read Alex’s sad tale. Actually, it’s not really sad because his review will be published elsewhere, and this rejection does him no profesional damage.  But the way he was treated reflects yet another academic taboo like the one I discussed in the last post. In this case, the taboo involves saying anything critical about gender science or, in this case, philosophy, particularly about a book written by a trans person.

Some excerpts:

last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 book Trouble with Gender and other places.

Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.

I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.

By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:

Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.

To which she replied:

Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.

As I said, Alex’s review was not nasty but it was critical (there’s a link below), and he found a number of simple errors that Cosker-Rowland made. Here’s one:

I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):

Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).

I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”

Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.

He found other errors that he didn’t mention in the review but gives in this piece (you can see his entire review here, in Philosophy & Public Affairs). Here’s Byrne’s summing up given in the last two sentences of his review:

Back in the day, we knew what it was to be transsexual. Transsexuality’s contemporary descendant, being transgender, is decidedly more nebulous and deserves an explanation. Gender identity as Cosker-Rowland conceives of it is of no help, and neither is obstetrical paperwork.

Some weeks after submitting the review to Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Byrne got a rejection that said only that the journal site was “not moving forward” with publication. No reasons were given. Alex wrote back to the editor asking if they would be so kind as to answer two questions:

1. Who was the board member who initially vetted my review? This is not blind reviewing, I take it. The board member knew who wrote the review. Seems only fair that I should know the identity of the board member. If the board member had reasonable concerns, then there should be no objection to making everything transparent.

2. What, exactly, was the reason why you have decided not to publish the review?

Well, reviewers aren’t always entitled to the names of those who vetted a review, but certainly reasons should be given for a rejection.  None were, except that one board member declined to vet Alex’s piece and the other “recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” That was the only feedback he got. Byrne isn’t moaning about this, but his essay does have a serious point about the infection of the publication process in his field by ideology:

The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.

Amen!

Crick, Cobb, London

March 14, 2026 • 8:30 am

by Greg Mayer

On my visit to England earlier this year, one of my goals was to get a copy of Crick, Matthew’s award-winning biography of Francis Crick, co-proposer of the now well-known double helix structure for DNA. Like Jerry, I prefer the dust jacket of the British edition, and thought it would be fitting to get a copy of the British edition in Britain.

I first looked in the very extensive gift shop of the British Museum. It had many biographies, on a wide range of personages, but relatively few on scientists (or science books in general)– a clerk I queried kindly explained the shop’s offerings.

It did, however, have a fine selection of cat books.

My next try was at the Natural History Museum gift shop, which had a nice book section, but not nearly as large as that at the British Museum, and no Crick.

With the days of our stay running low, my wife and I did a half-day of shopping, and headed to Foyles, which had been recommended to us.

Checking Foyles’ website, the Charing Cross Road shop had copies. The store was a revelation– I have not seen a bookstore like this in the US for many years– I could have spent a lot of time there!

But we were on a quest, so we headed straight to the “Biography” section on the ground floor, but no Crick. A clerk explained to us that if it wasn’t there among the recent biographies, there was a large biography section upstairs. Upstairs, again, no luck. A clerk there, when queried, though, said right away to check the science section, pointing us towards it, and success!

I am not quite done reading it yet, but I have learned much and heartily recommend it. Although but a small part of the story, I was intrigued by Matthew’s account of how the order of authorship was determined for the 4 papers on DNA that Watson and Crick published in 1953-1954.

There were three other items on my list of things to find in London: first, Jerry’s favorite English beer, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord– done!

We got it at the Zetland Arms, not far from the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.

Then, an Everton scarf, which we tried for at Lillywhites, a big sporting goods store off Piccadilly Circus. When my wife said “blue and white scarf” to the clerk, he smiled and said “Chelsea, of course”, but when we explained it was Everton, he said it was 50-50 at best (they had maybe half the Premier League club scarfs), and Everton was among the missing. I thought we were out of luck, but we stopped at the Museum Superstore, a tourist trap souvenir shop two doors down from the British Museum, looking for some tea tins, but my wife emerged from the back of the store with an Everton scarf— qapla’!

I had also been hoping to get a book on British amphibians and reptiles more up to date than my copy of Nick Arnold’s book. There are a few such books, but, alas, neither Foyles nor the Natural History Museum had one. 🙁

Matthew Cobb wins big prize for his Crick biography

March 6, 2026 • 9:45 am

I told you that Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick was good! Now Crick: A Mind in Motion has been given the imprimatur of quality by winning a big book prize in England.  Matthew sent me his Bluehair post below, and when I asked him what prize he won, he replied:

Hatchard’s First Biography Prize. Hatchards is a posh bookshop on Piccadilly where the King buys his books. I will get a proper cheque. £2.5k! 

It is a big check—in both senses:

I won! I have a big cheque!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-03-05T19:23:03.888Z

Below is the site for the prize (click to go there). Note, too that Matthew’s book beat out the John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, a book about Lennon and McCartney and Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealisme, a kiss-and-tell memoirSarah Wynn-Williams, who used to work for Facebook and who has been clobbered with lawsuits by that company and other people. 

And the site’s announcement:

Hatchards has teamed up with The Biographers’ Club to support the Best First Biography Prize.

The prize awards £2,500 to the best biography or memoir published that year, and has been won in recent years by Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar.

This year’s winner is Crick by Matthew Cobb.

Go buy it, or take it out from the library to read it. (This advice is for people who are interested in science, but if you’re not, you shouldn’t be reading here.)

Congratulations to Matthew! I told him to use the £2500 prize to treat himself to something nice, like a vacation.

Amazon review of “The War on Science” volume rejected for using “woke” as pejorative

March 5, 2026 • 11:00 am

Reader Jon Gallant recently finished the essay collection compiled and edited by Lawrence Krauss, The War on Science:  Thirty-Nine Renowed Scientists and Scholars speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.” (Luana and I have a paper in it taken from our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology).

Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission).  I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:

At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company.  Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes?  I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure.  I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:

Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”.  After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe.  My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon.  The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.

In truth, I can see no other explanation.  The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear.  If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.

I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)