Non-fiction publishing is failing its readers. It is pumping out books with supposedly game-changing ideas, without bothering to ensure basic accuracy. These tomes have the appearance of academic work, but none of the rigour.
My frustration about this has been building for years and finally exploded when I reviewed Yuval Noah Harari鈥檚 new book Nexus, which is full of ill-supported nonsense, including a hopelessly incoherent definition of the concept of information.
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Consider Johann Hari: formerly a journalist at The Independent, he was caught plagiarising and resigned. He has since produced a string of unreliable books about medical controversies. Lost Connections is about the science of depression and is filled with dubious statistics, which he uses to falsely claim antidepressants don鈥檛 work in the long term. Stolen Focus argues that technologies like smartphones are making it harder to concentrate, even though there are no long-term studies showing changes in attention spans.
Books by academics are similarly shonky. Steven Pinker鈥檚 Enlightenment Now had 鈥渟erious flaws鈥�, according to 快猫短视频鈥榮 reviewer, and was by historians of the Enlightenment for misrepresenting the ideas of its key thinkers. Jonathan Haidt鈥檚 claims smartphones and social media are causing an epidemic of poor mental health in children, despite meta-analyses saying the evidence for harms is weak.
There is an obvious but wrong explanation for these bad books, which is that the authors are writing outside their expertise. Harari is a medieval historian. Pinker mostly studies the psychology of language; Haidt, the emotional roots of morality. You might argue they are engaged in . However, it would be ridiculous to say people should only write about topics they have personally researched as academics. On that basis, I could only write about epilepsy.
Besides, many books by subject experts are riddled with errors. Matthew Walker is an eminent sleep scientist, yet independent researcher Alexey Guzey found a in just the first chapter of his book Why We Sleep, notably a false claim that the World Health Organization had 鈥渄eclared a sleep loss epidemic鈥�.
And then there is Naomi Wolf, whose 2019 book Outrages was by its US publisher after the most in recent memory. Wolf that gay men in England were frequently executed in the 1800s 鈥� only to be told she had misread court documents and no such executions had occurred. The book was based on Wolf鈥檚 PhD.
No, the problem is much simpler, and it is a dirty secret of non-fiction publishing: most books aren鈥檛 fact-checked. If an author makes a mistake or misinterprets a study, nobody stops them.
In journalism, fact-checking practices vary widely. 快猫短视频 has two layers of editors, who each ensure readability and accuracy. Others are even stricter: fact-checkers at The New Yorker re-report entire stories. Non-fiction publishing is far more relaxed. Often, there is no fact-checking at all: editors offer guidance on readability, but take factual claims on trust. The UK publishers of my book The Genesis Quest did this (though my US publishers, a university press, recruited anonymous peer reviewers).
It is easy to see why this has happened. Nuance is difficult to sell. If your book has a counterintuitive thesis, or simply promotes a moral panic, it is easier to market. Non-fiction authors who are rigorous and careful can鈥檛 compete. That鈥檚 why shops are flooded with books about one neat trick for a better life or how everything you know is wrong. But without fact-checking, these books might as well be scrawled in crayon. Publishers must do better.
Michael Marshall is a聽science journalist and聽author of
