My Book Is Out in Paperback
It has a new chapter with a few things to say about H5N1, mpox — and The New York Times
My book The Wisdom of Plagues is out in paperback as of today. Since I finished writing the hardback edition in the fall of 2023 and viruses keep mutating — as do perceptions of historical events — Simon & Schuster let me write a new addendum chapter.
Most of it is about our false memories of Covid and the threats of H5N1 and the new central African strain of mpox/monkeypox. I didn’t make any wild predictions because I had to file in September and I feared H5N1 would shift course in the publishing interim. It has: it’s now clearly two separate clades, one in birds and one in cows. And both can infect humans, and as of this week, one human has died of it. That is definitely bad news. The fact that variants infecting humans turned up late in the illness of the Louisiana patient is worrying, but not terribly surprising. When a virus is under a long but weak couterattack from a human immune system, it mutates to evade that attack. That doesn’t necessarily mean that strain will arise in nature. We still can’t say whether this virus will go pandemic or just pick humans off one by one as it has since 1997.
I also decided to break my own rule for the book and add something about how The New York Times treated me. Because I feel it is still mistreating me, even in regard to the book itself. Probably not out of active spite, but out of the miasma of passive corporate cowardice that infuses the place.
In the addendum chapter, I wrote this:
“I worked at The New York Times for more than four decades and was its
chief global health reporter for twenty-five years. I didn’t mention my
departure in the hardcover edition of The Wisdom of Plagues because I
wanted to be remembered as a good science reporter. But every review and
every interviewer has mentioned or even focused on the Times’ decision to oust me. And the paper’s reaction to this book has been to pretend that
it does not exist.
It did not publish a review. To that, I might say, “Fair enough, they can’t review everything,” although it typically does review books by its reporters and even former reporters. Also, I believe Wisdom is of interest to Times readers: It contains insights into how the world’s most important newspaper covered one of the biggest stories of the century. And it
explains how errors in that coverage were made — some my fault, some not.
What I find more disappointing is that the Times has not even mentioned
the book in passing — never including it, for example, in one of its weekly
“new and noteworthy books” lists.*
I doubt there was any diktat from on high. I suspect it was just the
paper’s culture of fear that made editors hesitate. The masthead and the
corporate communications office will deny that any such climate exists,
but I started at the paper as a copy boy in 1976, and I know better. It has
a long history of editors fearful to make decisions that could lead to their
judgment being questioned. There are only two topics that a Times reporter cannot cover objectively: The New York Times itself, and the Sulzberger family, which owns a controlling interest.
As a negotiator and organizer for the News Guild, the journalists’
union, I was sometimes harshly critical of management; I also asked many questions at the annual “State of the Times” meetings, mostly about cut-
backs to our pay and benefits and excessive executive compensation. I can also, unquestionably, be a difficult employee. I’m stubborn, especially
about my work. I come across to some people as arrogant and dismissive,
although I can also be funny and sometimes even kind. I was generally
acknowledged to be a good reporter and I was hired in an era when a
reporter’s accuracy, drive, and writing ability were more important than his
personality. My departure at the height of the pandemic — which coincided
with the height of “cancel culture” — was controversial. On March 1, 2021,
I described it in relentless detail in a four-part essay on Medium. The Times has not since rebutted a single one of those 20,000 unflattering words. I suspect, however, that I’m paying the price for writing them.”
I’ll be curious to see if and how the Times reacts. Only actions, not words, will matter. I do believe the Times’ top editors, as a matter of journalistic honor, strive to tell the truth and correct errors— even if it sometimes takes decades for them to do so. I don’t have the same opinion of the CorpComms office.
If you’ve read Wisdom, thank you. If you haven’t, it’s cheaper now. Probably only another pandemic could give it a shot at the paperback bestseller lists. But wishing for that would, alas, be immoral.
*After I wrote the extra chapter for the paperback, there was one passing mention of the book. It was in an “In Times Past” column by David W. Dunlap in November about a carton that once contained a vaccine against Japanese encephalitis on display in the Museum of the Times, which David oversees. (Years ago, when we had big cubicles, mine was a pile of disease-related tchotchkes: male and female condoms from various countries, C.D.C. flash cards, early safe syringes, a stuffed “mad cow,” etc. When we were downsized to mini-desks, I donated it all to the incipient museum.)
