I knew the jig was up when one day, in the fall of 1995, my boss and publisher Peter Osnos asked me to lunch. I was then editorial director of Times Books, an imprint of Random House. Previously, I had been publisher of Hill & Wang, a nonfiction division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I’d had some success during my years there in the late 1980s, publishing Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, Hill & Wang’s first bestseller since Elie Wiesel’s Night in 1960. Wiesel’s slim and scorching account of his torment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald had been rejected by more than fifteen American publishers before Arthur Wang took it on. It was not an immediate success despite glowing reviews. Over time, however, it would sell more than ten million copies and become a central text in the world’s moral education, such as it is. Paulos’ polemic pressing the case for mathematical literacy was unlikely to find similar favor, especially given the one-hand-clapping review buried in the middle of the New York Times Book Review. Yet to my surprise it vaulted to the upper echelons of bestseller lists all over the country, including the Times, largely, I came to believe, because of its brevity — it was more essay than full-length jeremiad — written with engaging wit, and so it didn’t feel like homework. It did a lot to help many people overcome their allergy to numbers.
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence