“I can’t say that we responded with particular enthusiasm”

June 25, 2013

In 1998, not long after publishing his first novel, Dan Brown paid a visit to an English class at Phillips Exeter. Among the students in attendance that day was future New Yorker editor Joshua Rothman, whose fragmented recollection of Brown’s appearance turned into an instructive tale about “memory and its tricks.”

is a staff writer for The Millions. He lives in New York.