Various Articles

  • TV GUIDE ('My neck was out', November 1972)
  • REDBOOK MAGAZINE (Love is…*, February 1988; Happiness*, May 1991),
  • POPULAR SCIENCE (America Beyond (After the Challenger Disaster)*, 1988), 
  • POPULAR MECHANICS (Spaceport America, May 1989), 
  • NEWSWEEK (Greater Expectations, September 1990), 
  • SCIENCE (Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities, March 1999), 
  • PARADE (Let´s Stop Scaring Ourselves, December 2004), 
  • INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP FORUM (Vanishing Intellectual Diversity, March 2006) 
  • THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (Bodysnatchers 2006*, December 2006).
  • AMAZON.COM (Review of Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It, 2007)
*Available at www.michaelcrichton.com/essays.html

1983 - 1985 Collaborations in Computing magazies

Around the time Michael Crichton was creating his first computer game, Amazon, he also expressed his interest and views about computing through four articles and an interview for the magazine Creative Computing, and and article in Compute!.


Creative Computing Vol. 9 No. 3 - March 1983:

Creative Computing Vol. 10 No. 6 - June 1984:

Creative Computing Vol. 10 No. 11 - November 1984:

Creative Computing Vol. 11 No. 2 - February 1985:


Creative Computing Magazine
Image from: http://www.atarimagazines.com/

Compute! Vol. 7 No 2 - February 1985:



1971 & 1988 - 1991 Playboy Magazine


Michael Crichton also caught the eye of the mens' Playboy Magazine. They published a novel of his in installments, short stories, these articles and an interview. The articles he wrote for Playboy are the following:

The High Cost of Fame (1971)


This was a contribution of an emerging author in a written "symposium" on how he was dealing with the fame he harnessed with The Andromeda Strain.

The following three constitute a marriage-life self-help trilogy published over a four-year time span.

Panic in the Sheets (Jan 1988)               Men´s hearts (Feb 1989)                     How to argue (Dec 1991)




1968 - 2007 Articles in The New York Times

Michael Crichton remained in contact with the publication that gave him a decisive push towards writing by publishing his teenage article Climbing Up A Cinder Cone back in 1959, and occasionally wrote articles for The New York times over a period of 20 years:

The New York Times
  • Life, Death and the Doctor (book review, 1968)
  • A Scientist Can Always Say No to Secrecy (1971)
  • Listerine and Other Methods (book review, 1978)
  • Time for Tough Talk in the Land of the Setting Sun (1992)
  • This Essay Breaks the Law (2006)
  • Patenting Life (2007)
  • Where Does It Hurt (book review, 2007)

One can already see an overarching theme in these articles that mirrors the concerns about the relationship of humans with science and technology, including in the latter the practicioners of medicine. Michael Crichton reveals himself in these articles as an advocate of the human being in front of the uses and abuses of science and technology, calling for the need to make scientists and drivers of technology accountable to society like everyone else. This is still today a relevant topic that is far from settled. It is interesting to see that the debate has accompanied the advancement of science and technology in similar terms for so many years.

1961 -1964 Articles for The Harvard Crimson

At medical school in Harvard, Michael Crichton regularly contributed to the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, which is still being published today. He wrote 31 articles in total, mostly book, film or theater reviews.
The articles will be among the hits of the search for "Crichton" on the site of the newspaper.


Thanks once more to fellow Michael Crichton fan Marla Warren for pointing out to me these collector gems.

1959 - The Famous New York Times Article

Every biography of Michael Crichton tells the story of how his first ever published work was an article he sent to the New York Times. The article is called Climbing Up a Cinder Cone and he was 14 when he wrote it, 16 when it was published. Crichton tells the story himself in his autobiographical work Travels.



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