Archives for October 13, 2020

From 2003:

As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art. Time was when many magazines—if not most—rigorously checked every factual assertion made in every story they published. When I was writing profiles for Mirabella nine years ago, the checkers even required me to give them my interview tapes. But by the time I got to Time, the rigor had loosened considerably. My Time stories about the arts were “self-checked,” a wonderfully Orwellian euphemism meaning that they weren’t checked at all—it was assumed that I knew what I was talking about…

Read the whole thing here.

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations