We are sorry we’ve been missing so many episodes recently! Stuart’s been busy and Tom’s been… also busy. We’re busy. Hopefully back to normal service next week.
In the meantime, here’s an old paid episode, unpaywalled. Apologies.
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Johann Hari is a journalist with an interesting past who has now written four very popular books on scientific topics (addiction, depression, attention, and obesity). Are those books any good?
In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart—who have both written reviews of Hari’s books—discuss Hari’s career, his sudden emergence as a science writer, and exactly how many miles you need to travel around the world to ensure your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.
Show Notes
The funniest bad book review ever, of The Meaning of Disgust by Colin McGinn (review by Nina Strohminger)
Hari’s corrections page for his new book where he discusses the Jay Rayner debacle
Article about Hari’s quotations of Antonio Negri
Brian Whelan’s criticism of Hari from 2011
And another article by the same author on the same topic
Guy Walters on Hari in the New Statesman
David Allen Green on Hari and the allegations of sockpuppeting and Wikipedia editing
Hari’s “personal apology” from 2011 where he admits to the Wikipedia editing and some of the sloppiness with quotes
Telegraph blog on Hari and the translation in his article on the Central African Republic (Hari denies making up the quote)
Amazon pages for Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, Stolen Focus, and Magic Pill
Jeremy Duns on quotations in Chasing the Scream
Dean Burnett’s viral criticism of Lost Connections
Stuart’s tweets from 2018 where he attempts to find the source of Hari’s depression-relapse numbers
Collection of Matthew Sweet’s criticisms of the studies behind Stolen Focus
Even more tweets from Matthew Sweet
Stuart’s tweet on the “average American worker” study cited by Hari
Study of body image distortions in 100 people… done in 1987
2018 study of whether a parenting intervention reduces child BMI
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
