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Alex Berenson on Tell Your Children
Berenson discusses and is challenged on his marijuana research at the Hudson Institute.
Quick facts
Business · FinanceOn my shelf
The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America
Berenson’s nonfiction debut examines how the fixation on quarterly earnings per share reshaped corporate behavior during the 1982-2000 bull market, tracing the thread connecting Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and other scandals back to a single obsessive number that investors treat as the measure of a company’s health.
Written by a Times financial investigative reporter during his time covering Wall Street fraud, The Number remains a clear, accessible explainer of how the mechanics of quarterly reporting created incentives for exactly the kind of accounting manipulation that produced the early-2000s scandals.
Health Policy · Cannabis
Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence
Berenson argues that legalized marijuana’s rise has been accompanied by understated risks, particularly a link between high-THC cannabis use and psychosis in a vulnerable minority of users, and that this connection can in turn increase violent behavior.
Tell Your Children generated significant pushback from scientists and physicians, many of whom argued in open letters and reviews that Berenson draws causal conclusions from correlational data and relies heavily on selected anecdotes. Read alongside that criticism, it’s a useful case study in how contested public-health claims get made and contested in real time.
Public Health · COVID-19
Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives
Berenson’s account of the COVID-19 pandemic response argues that lockdowns, mask mandates, and other public health measures were disproportionate to the actual risk the virus posed, drawing on data he compiled and published independently after being suspended from Twitter for his pandemic commentary.
Pandemia became a rallying text for critics of pandemic-era public health policy and was praised by figures on the political right, while mainstream public health officials and many scientists disputed its central claims. It’s most useful read as a documented record of the contrarian position during the pandemic, alongside the mainstream scientific consensus it argues against.
Frequently asked questions about Alex Berenson’s books
From the bookshelf
“Earnings per share is the number for which all other numbers are sacrificed.”
— Alex Berenson, The Number
For more contrarian nonfiction worth reading alongside its critics, browse the full shelf.
