Do we like them?

Do we like Eric Weiner?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy turned up in the searches, but I couldn't open the full articles, so this is a cautious middle-high score.

This is the Eric Weiner who writes the happiness and ideas books, not the other Eric Weiner (a financial journalist) or the similarly named TV writer in the news for very different reasons. Bios describe him as a former NPR foreign correspondent who reported from dozens of countries before turning to books.

His breakout style is the grumpy-traveller memoir. Man Seeks God, which NPR stations covered in 2011, followed him through the world's religions, with a Staten Island stop on the way. It's curious and self-deprecating rather than preachy.

The Geography of Genius, from 2016, asked why brilliant ideas cluster in certain places and times. He told CBC's The Current that geography seems to matter more than genes, and he spoke about the book on public radio too.

The Socrates Express (2020) was his tour of life lessons from dead philosophers, covered by NPR in August 2020. His later book Ben & Me, about Benjamin Franklin, came out in 2024, but I couldn't open a dated page on it to cite properly.

On the harm check, I searched his name against LGBTQ+ and trans issues, women, migrants, climate and politics, and found no harmful words or acts, and no troubling company in his projects. Be fair about the limit: the searches were thin and I couldn't read full articles, so this means nothing turned up, not that every angle is covered.

On the good-person side, searches for lawsuits, allegations and complaints about him came up empty. The only legal-trouble results belonged to differently named people. I also didn't find any documented charity work, so the good stuff here is his decades of curious, kind-spirited writing.