Stolen Focus: attention claims under scrutiny

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.

…

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

* Stuart’s Unherd review of Stolen Focus

* 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

* Tom’s Guardian review of Magic Pill

* 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.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe