Ever wondered how the fact-checking process works? Well wonder no longer. The Columbia Journalism Review posted an excerpt from their recently published Art of Making Magazines collection, and it explains The New Yorker’s workflow as well as the perils of “Shoot-the-Fact-Checker Syndrome.”
How Fact-Checking Works
“Free to make her a watery presence”
Recommended Reading: Jonathan Lee’s interview with Year in Reading favorite Rachel Kushner. The piece is a nice complement to our own interview with Kushner from last year.
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Books Per Square Foot
Via BookRiot we came across this ranking of the top 10 U.S. cities for book lovers; scroll down to see the methodology behind the list. Also pair with our own Janet Potter's relationship history with bookstores.
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The Guesthouse of Mirth
Edith Wharton is known as a novelist but she was also a wonderful hostess, whose guests (including Henry James) remember her as "kindness and hospitality incarnate." Kate Bolick has turned Wharton's life-long attempt to master “the complex art of civilized living" into an entertaining guide, "The Guesthouse of Mirth," just in time for those last few summer parties. Pair with Roxana Robinson's reflections on Wharton's life and works, including the original The House of Mirth.
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I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
"[L]et’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether." A new Emily Dickinson exhibition proves the poet wasn't nearly as much of a recluse as we've been led to think, writes Daniel Larkin for Hyperallergic. Pair with this piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of her poetry, which "transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese."
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A Worthy Prize
The New York Public Library has named five finalists for its inaugural Harriet Tubman prize, which recognizes non-fiction books that explore the topic of slavery. You may also want to revisit our own Edan Lepucki's essay from a few years back on slavery in fiction.
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One of the most fascinating glimpses into fact-checking is THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT, which consists of the text of an article that John D’Agata published in THE BELIEVER and his often cranky but funny exchanges with the magazine’s fact checker, Jim Fingal; the email exchanges between D’Agata and Fingal take up much of the book than does the original article. (Complicating this whole question is that some accounts say that the exchanges in the book were written to represent the process of fact-checking, rather than being exactly the exchanges between D’Agata and Fingal.) Still, for journalism/writing/editing geeks, it’s a fascinating book.
I know this pushes the discussion away from the original post just a bit (fact-checking) but carrying this even further, into the whole question of “what is fact” in non-fiction, is an essay that appears on TriQuarterly, “The Facts of the Matter.”
Great point, Joe. Here’s that article in case anybody else is curious: http://triquarterly.org/essay/facts-matter
Also here’s Millions staffer Mark O’Connell’s review of THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT: https://www.themillions.com/2012/03/cool-story-bro-the-provocations-of-john-dagata.html