Their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities

The New Yorker has drifted far from the James Thurber and E.B. White days.  

Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime…

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) December 12, 2025

In the past decade or so, I can think of at least three of their writers who have gotten into hot water for plagiarism, misquoting or loose ways with the truth.  Fine essayists all but of little help in navigating an increasingly chaotic epistemic world.  Jonah Lehrer, Malcom Gladwell and now . . . Oliver Sacks.

They were soft pablum entertainment but of little help in the pursuit of truth.  Well, that's not strictly true.  I have commented in other posts that Gladwell has been useful in cultivating skepticism.  He writes so seductively that you have to always maintain an alert mind to what camel is being slipped into the tent without your noticing.  

Malcolm Gladwell I have always enjoyed.  A fine essayist and at least a catalyst for thinking through why some of his claims might not be accurate.  Lehrer I enjoyed but only discovered him just before he fell.  

Oliver Sacks was in a different category.  He has been held out as a superb essayist and fine clinician dealing in interesting areas of the human brain/psychology.  And yet I never have taken to him at all, either in the magazine or with his books.  Over the years I have acquired at least three (An Anthropologist on Mars, Oaxaca Journal, and The Island of the Colorblind) and maybe one or two others (I think I have The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat floating around somewhere.)  Haven't read more than an essay in any one of them.  

I buy them, sample them and then set them aside.  Plenty of books don't grab me at first but later, at the right moment, I engage with and enjoy.  Reading is a serendipitous activity and sometimes you just have to wait for the moment.  And sometimes, the moment never comes.

But all of them, Gladwell, Lehrer, Sacks, now seen to be purveyors of cognitive pollution of the first order.

Pinker in his series of tweets:

Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers,  pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?

Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite (carrying on C. P. Snow's war of prestige between "the two cultures). A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as a fatuous diatribe against a dictionary based on a modern understanding of language, by their dance critic Joan Acocella, an ignoramus on this topic, mirroring a similar polemic by the critic Dwight MacDonald in the magazine 50 years before.  

Sounds about right.  A cultivated sensibility that is more about class inclusion than understanding the world.