‘Why Biology Is Not Destiny’: An Exchange

In response to:

Why Biology Is Not Destiny from the April 21, 2022 issue

To the Editors:

Marcus Feldman and Jessica Riskin did not like my book. Or rather, they did not like a book called The Genetic Lottery by an author named “Kathryn Paige Harden,” but their review [NYR, April 21] so badly distorts my arguments that I have the curious impression that Feldman and Riskin somehow got their hands on another book entirely, an evil doppelgänger to mine. Therapists, parents, and the unhappily married would recognize the feeling I had upon reading their review the first time: it’s both vexing and bewildering when someone is spoiling for a fight about something you never said.

As a longtime reader of The New York Review of Books, I am surprised and disappointed that this review was published in such an esteemed outlet. Yes, “we all enjoy an intemperate paragraph of syntactically inspired bile,” to quote Zadie Smith, and Feldman and Riskin do deliver the bile. But I assume that, besides wanting to be entertained by vitriol...