‘Why Biology Is Not Destiny’: An Exchange
By Kathryn Paige Harden et al.,
The New York Review
| 05. 25. 2022
Kathryn Paige Harden, Nick Patterson, Victor I. Reus, and Henry D. Schlinger Jr., reply by M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin
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...
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Following a long-standing CGS tradition, we present a selection of our favorite Biopolitical Times posts of the past year.
In 2025, we published up to four posts every month, written by 12 authors (staff, consultants and allies), some in collaboration and one simply credited to CGS.
These titles are presented in chronological order, except for three In Memoriam notices, which follow. Many more posts that are worth your time can be found in the archive. Scroll down and “VIEW...
