“This week, The New Yorker attached its own extraordinary editor’s note to a National Magazine Award–winning 2018 article by staff writer and novelist Elif Batuman about Japan’s so-called rent-a-family industry, in which desperate and lonely people hire actors to play their absent fathers, wives, children, and so on. The New Yorker reported that three central figures in the story had ‘made false biographical claims to Batuman and to a fact checker,’ undermining the veracity of large swathes of the article and revealing this particular rent-a-family business to be something of a scam.” Ryu Spaeth looks into how and why this could have happened. – The New Republic