Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Pinker does get a lot of press, though most-covered doesn’t always mean most-loved. While Enlightenment Now received ecstatic blurbs — Bill Gates called it his “favorite book of all time” — other assessments were less kind. A New York Times reviewer panned it as “disdainful and condescending — sympathetic to humanity in the abstract but impervious to the suffering of actual human beings.” The dismissive term “Pinkering” has been coined to describe applying a too-sunny gloss to world events. A cartoon strip published in Current Affairs shows a crazed-looking Pinker staring into a mirror: “Remember,” cartoon Pinker says to himself, “no matter what people say it’s statistically impossible for you to be the worst person on the planet.” In addition, a surprising number of detractors have referred to Harvard’s Johnstone family professor of psychology as “Peven Stinker,” which, while not exactly an argument, does capture a certain disdain.
More here.