His most recent book, published May 2019, is The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.
[citation needed] Most of his career has been spent as an editor, at such places as Alfred A. Knopf; Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; Esquire Magazine; New England Monthly; Life Magazine; and Time, Inc. His book Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (Viking, 2003) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.
It states: "The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true", referring to the phenomenon of the press providing legitimacy to unsupported fringe viewpoints in an effort to appear even-handed.
The name comes from the fact that he proposed the idea to his friends while dining at La Rôtisserie Française restaurant on New York City's East 52nd Street.
His exploits of inventing Rotisserie League Baseball were chronicled in Silly Little Game, part of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary series, in 2010.
[16] During the nine-part series, a red-sweater-wearing Okrent delivered a detailed analysis of the cultural aspects of the national pastime, including a comparison of the dramatic Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds to the conflict and character development in Russian novels.
[17] He believed that the advancement of digital technologies would make it easier for people to read newspapers, magazines and books online.