I finally finished the profile of Yuval Noah Harari and can report that I hated it. It was a deliberate cheap-shot takedown. It wasn’t a straight-up profile, nor was it a straight-up critique of his work. It was a pretend profile laced with snide, condescending little digs, some of which may have some truth to them but were not well argued in the piece. Don’t get me wrong — I like Harari’s book so am naturally inclined to defend him. But if, say, Adam Gopnik or Louis Menand had written a fair and thoughtful essay debunking it, that would be OK. This writer wasn’t good enough to do that.