I thought that the curation was fairly widely known, at least in the community of book lovers. But, in this case they weren't claiming it was excluded from the list because some editor removed it in the interest of "curating," they claimed it was excluded because of a hard rule about not including books that weren't published in the US.

It would be nice if someone could find a couple of examples of non-controversial books that made the top of other bestseller lists but that the NYT excluded because they weren't published in the US. That would make it a lot easier to defend the accusations that they are using "Canadian published" as an excuse to keep a book off the list they don't like. There have got to be several publishers in other English speaking countries with very popular books that don't have any US presence that still sold well here.

I guess this incident makes it more widely known.