Bruno Maddox - Recent Essays

Recent Essays

After the publication of My Little Blue Dress in 2001, Maddox was reportedly working on a second novel set in California, where "everyone's aspirational and deluded" and the "people are quite happy being waiters and dreaming of stardom". As of 2009, however, no manuscript has been forthcoming.

Since 2001, Maddox has written numerous articles for popular magazines, such as the now-defunct GEAR. Published one year after the 11 September 2001 attacks, his essay "Before It Was Real" describes the callousness of the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center through the experience of playing a flight simulator game. Another example of Maddox's work is his 2003 profile of Karl Wenclas, leader of the Underground Literary Alliance, titled "The Angriest Book Club in America" and published in the fashion magazine BlackBook. Wenclas later derided Maddox for distorting the Underground Literary Alliance in his BlackBook essay and summed up the article as "riddled with falsehoods".

In late 2003, Maddox began to contribute articles regularly to Travel + Leisure. His first article in the magazine was called "The Concorde, R.I.P.", which chronicled his flight aboard the supersonic Concorde airplane before it was decommissioned; it was later included in The Best Travel Writing 2005, the second volume of the annual Travelers’ Tales series. In 2004 Maddox began working as a contributing editor for the American edition of The Week magazine and as of 2007 continues to contribute weekly to the print issue, handling sections including "Main Stories", "Talking Points", and "Only in America". He also reviewed several books for The New York Post in 2004 and 2005.

In 2006, Maddox began contributing a regular humor column called "Blinded by Science" to Discover magazine. His writing draws upon his childhood exposure to science; due to his father's career, his family was immersed in science and he was regularly exposed to scientists at social events. Maddox's first year's columns earned him a nod as a finalist in the 2007 National Magazine Awards' "Columns and Commentary" category.

Maddox's Discover columns are occasionally criticized; his essay "Fictional Reality", in particular, has been controversial. Maddox declared science fiction obsolete in his essay "Fictional Reality" and was roundly criticized in the blogosphere, most notably by Scientific American's J.R. Minkel. Maddox wrote that "fiction—all fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas" as a result of the "scarcity of foreseeable future", citing the decline of author Michael Crichton's work as evidence. Minkel lambasted Maddox and pointed to author Neal Stephenson's cutting-edge work as proof to the contrary, venturing that "science fiction writers can dictate the future if they have the vim and vision".

One of Maddox's most recent Discover essays, "The James Watson Affair", examines comments made by James Watson in an article in London's Sunday Times which led to Watson's suspension at the laboratory where he worked and his eventual retirement, and is skeptical of critics who found Watson's comment about black employees "not that big a deal" yet charged him with racism for his proposition on black African intelligence; in conclusion, Maddox derides the views held by several critics, stating that in comparison to Watson's statements, "the most ignorant and hurtful idea of all, of course, is that the entire topic of race and genes and intelligence is off-limits to all right-thinking, compassionate people, just on principle", which pejoratively assumes "that some races are innately and immutably much less intelligent than others". Maddox's essay, although published in the March 2008 printed edition of Discover, has not been published online.