Tag: audio

The early magazine was riddled with mistakes. The New Yorker was known for its newsbreaks, which mocked other publications’ errors and oddities. In 1929, Ross concluded, “We are running misprints and clumsy wordings from other publications, and otherwise being Godlike, so WE MUST BE DAMN NEAR PURE OURSELF.” Soon, there were several full-time checkers. When the magazine profiled Luce, and wanted to confirm the number of rooms in his mansion, a checker was sent there to pose as a prospective renter.

Ross was delighted by the new arrangement. He began firing off memos:

“Can moles see? And do they ever come above ground of their own volition?”

“Can you find out whether or not there is a Podunk River in Connecticut?”

“Do the catalogues of Sears and Montgomery Ward still list farm and stock whips, drovers’ whips and quirts?”

What Ross gave to the checkers was the idea that it mattered to understand the world in all its weirdness. Also: a willingness to admit ignorance. He once popped his head into the checkers’ room and asked, “Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?”

Ross was never satisfied with his creation. “He must have set up a dozen different systems, during my years with him, for keeping track of manuscripts and verifying facts,” James Thurber wrote. Ross studied the New York Telephone Company’s system of checking names and phone numbers and concluded that, despite its best efforts, it never managed to put out a directory with fewer than three mistakes. Thurber continued, “If the slightest thing went wrong, he would bawl, ‘The system’s fallen down!’ ”

How do you confirm a fact? You ask, over and over, “How do we know?” Years ago, John McPhee wrote about a Japanese incendiary balloon that, during the Second World War, floated across the Pacific and struck an electrical cable serving a top-secret nuclear site; a reactor that enriched plutonium for the atomic bomb bound for Nagasaki was temporarily disabled. How did McPhee know? Someone had told him. How did that person know? He’d heard about it—secondhand. The checker, Sara Lippincott, spent weeks trying to track down an original source. Just before the magazine went to the printer, she got a lead. She called the source at home, in Florida. He was at the mall. How to locate him in time? She called the police. They found him and put him in a phone booth. Did he know about the incident? He did. How? He was the reactor’s site manager; he saw it happen. The detail made it in.

Sometimes one source is enough. Sometimes ten aren’t. Checking is a forced humility. The longer you check, the more you doubt what you think you know. We are constantly misunderstanding one another, often literally. In the nineties, the former Secretary of Education William Bennett, a family-values Republican and the editor of an anthology called “The Book of Virtues,” uttered the phrase “a real us-and-them kind of thing.” It was misheard as “a real S & M kind of thing.” The magazine had to issue a correction. People also lie, regret, renounce. One subject of a Raffi Khatchadourian piece complained that multiple details about his life were made up and demanded to know what idiot had given Khatchadourian the erroneous details. The idiot was the man himself; the details came from his book. A disputatious source is actually more helpful than the opposite. The checking system, like the justice system, requires something to push against. When Parker Henry checked Patrick Radden Keefe’s Profile of Anthony Bourdain, Bourdain wasn’t able to get on the phone, so Henry sent him a memo containing a hundred or so facts about some of the most sensitive parts of his life, including his heroin use and the collapse of a romantic relationship. He responded, “Looks good.”

Checkers talk to virtually all sources in a piece, named and unnamed. They also contact people who are mentioned, even glancingly, whom the writer didn’t already speak to, and many people not mentioned in the piece at all. Checkers don’t read out quotes or seek approval. Sources can’t make changes. They can flag errors, provide context and evidence. The checker then discusses the points of contention with the writer and the editor. It’s an intentionally adversarial process, like a court proceeding. You want to see every side’s best case. The editor makes the final call. In a sense, the checker is re-reporting a piece, probing for weak spots, reaching a hand across the gulf of misunderstanding. The checker also asks questions that, in any other situation, might prompt the respondent to wonder if she was experiencing a brain aneurysm. “Does the Swedish Chef have a unibrow?” “He actually has two separate eyebrows that come close together above his nose.” Could a peccary chase a human up a tree? Certainly if it’s a white-lipped peccary, which is the size of a small bear and prone to stampede. Zadie Smith once received a call regarding whether, years earlier, at Ian McEwan’s birthday party, a butterfly landed on her knee. When a Talk piece by Tad Friend described the singer Art Garfunkel waving his arms around, the checker asked Garfunkel to confirm that he had two arms.

Anne (Dusty) Mortimer-Maddox, a former longtime checker, used to say, “The way you fact-check is like reading them a bedtime story.” She went on, “You tell people facts rather than asking them. When fact checkers say, ‘Is it true that . . .,’ they come off sounding like district attorneys.” But sometimes, no matter how much you coo, a subject wants to yell. This also serves a purpose. Nick Paumgarten likes to note that checkers are in the fact business and the customer-service business. It helps if everyone comes away feeling heard. Peter Canby’s philosophy was that it’s better for a subject to scream before a piece is published than after—a controlled explosion. Screamers still provide useful information. They’re better than ignorers or trolls. Elon Musk once sent back an imagined Mad Libs-style story, riffing on all the details to be checked. Steve Bannon responded to a checking question with a blank e-mail.

Usually, checkers are pretty successful at getting people to respond. Checkers are not exactly neutral arbiters, but they’re as close as you’re going to get—a last chance to argue your case. The Taliban typically plays ball. So does the C.I.A. The F.B.I. does not. One checker spoke by phone with Osama bin Laden’s former Sharia adviser; he asked her to dress for the conversation “in accordance with Islamic principles of modesty.” Different cultures have different relationships with facts. The French position is that, if the author says something happened, it happened. One veteran Chinese journalist quoted in an Evan Osnos piece, who had never before experienced fact checking, said, “I felt like I was in the middle of an ancient ritual.” People can be surprisingly honest. Nicolas Niarchos, checking a piece by Ben Taub, called up one of the most powerful smugglers in the Sahel, who cheerfully confirmed every detail, including his trafficking of humans. At the end of the call, he said, “I have one request.”

Niarchos said, “What is that?”

He replied, “I want you to call me something else.”

“What would you like us to call you?”

“I’d like to be called Alber the Gorilla.”

The request was denied.

The real thrill is in having a license to ask, as directly as possible, about the thing you really want to know. Did Harvey Weinstein commit rape? Did the government know about the massacre? A checker named Camila Osorio once spent months on the phone with a former guerrilla commander who, it turned out, was implicated in a bombing in Colombia that almost killed Osorio’s mother.

A long checking call can be a weirdly intimate space. You ask about mass murders, traumas, state secrets, often with little preamble. A government official, after a call, once accused a checker of being “creepily obsessed” with him.

So far, Anna has found errors of counting, errors of framing (“One quibble with the framing, if you’ll allow me, is that you never mention how checkers quibble with the framing”), and errors of the too-good-to-check variety. For example, it turns out that Zadie Smith was asked not about a butterfly on her knee but about a slug on a wineglass. However, it’s one thing to know the facts, and another to persuade the author. Most writers appreciate having been checked but resent being checked. Checking makes evident how badly you’ve misinterpreted the world. It upsets your confidence in your own eyes and ears. Checking is invasive. In the eighties, Janet Malcolm was sued for defamation in a drawn-out case that involved the parsing of her reporting notes. She’d been accused of fabricating quotes; she maintained that she merely stitched quotes together, a journalistic transgression but, ultimately, not a legal one. (A court ruled in Malcolm’s favor.) From then on, the checking department required authors to turn over notes, recordings, and transcripts. “It’s like someone going through your underwear drawer,” Lawrence Wright told me. Checkers can see your shortcuts, your reportorial wheedling, your blind spots. Ben McGrath, another checker turned writer, said, “It’s really interesting to realize that, these people you’ve been reading and admiring, there’s six errors on every page. And it’s not that they’re full of shit. It’s that this is what every person is like.” As a general rule, the better the reporter, the better she gets along with checkers. Jay McInerney, a former checker, once wrote, of authors, “They resent you to the degree that they depend on you.” McInerney, who wrote “Bright Lights, Big City,” about a fact checker at a lightly fictionalized New Yorker, is probably the most famous former checker. He will admit he was not a great one; he got fired after about a year, when his claim that he could speak French was disproved by a litany of errors he let through in a piece reported from France. “I’ve written that I’m the first fact checker to get fired,” he told me. I pointed out that checkers hate claims like “the first.” “Nobody’s ever fact-checked me out of it,” he said. “Why don’t you just write it and see what the fact-checking department says?” (The department ransacked the archives and searched for checking rosters, and concluded that his assertion is nearly impossible to confidently confirm.)

Like customer-service bots, or H.R. directors, checkers and writers talk around things. They perform a delicate linguistic dance. At an exhausting stalemate on a minor point, the writer might say, “I think it’s O.K.,” which means “I know it’s not exactly correct, but you’re being a prig.” The checker might respond, “It won’t keep me up at night,” which means “You’re a barbarian, but it’s your name on the piece.” Deft checkers position themselves as collaborators. In a closing meeting— where the writer, editor, checker, and copy editor go over a piece—they come not just with errors but with solutions. Writers hate to be embarrassed by their own ignorance. Anna has a good ear for rhythm, and tends to cringe when left with no choice but to scramble it. Her negotiation style is disarming bluntness. It helps that she’s funny. (Anna: “Do you have a fix here?” Zach: “I had one, didn’t I?” Anna: “It wasn’t very good.”) The nuclear option is to invoke “on author,” which signifies something impossible to verify but witnessed or experienced by the author, and therefore grudgingly allowed by the checker, who renounces all culpability. Julian Barnes once explained, “If, for example, the fact checkers are trying to confirm that dream about hamsters which your grandfather had on the night Hitler invaded Poland—a dream never written down but conveyed personally to you on the old boy’s knee, a dream of which, since your grandfather’s death, you are the sole repository—and if the fact checkers, having had all your grandfather’s living associates up against a wall and having scoured dictionaries of the unconscious without success, finally admit they are stumped, then you murmur soothingly down the transatlantic phone, ‘I think you can put that on author.’ ”

One compromise is the hedge, phrases such as “likely,” or “around,” or “something like,” which turn the game of dictional darts into a round of horseshoes. Writers resent the “maybe”s and “at least”s and “almost”s that pock their prose like pimples—but perhaps not as much as they’d resent losing the material. Years ago, the magazine excerpted Ian Frazier’s book “Travels in Siberia,” which was supposed to begin, “There is no such place as Siberia.” The checker insisted upon “Officially, there is no such place as Siberia.” “I ended up not totally happy with it, but not regretting it,” Frazier said. “This kind of fact checking wasn’t nitpicking and wasn’t just a bureaucratic thing. It was an artistic advance of the twentieth century. It just clicked with modernism.” He went on, “Modernism is goodbye to self-expression, hello to what’s right in front of you,” and that means you better get the thing right. The hedge is an acceptance that the world is impossible to know accurately. It imparts to the writing a humbleness, an understatedness, and, perhaps, a smug fussiness: in other words, what people think of as The New Yorker’s voice. Still, the hedges irritate. One checker, upon leaving the magazine, wrote a goodbye e-mail saying, “After five years, I’m still fully in awe of the magazine that comes out every week.” Tad Friend replied-all, “As the magazine comes out 46 times a year, can we say ‘almost every week’?” (Friend was almost right; the actual number was forty-seven.)

Certain genres accommodate checking better than others. Investigatory works rely on it. Personal history does, too, though this often creates complications. One checker called checking a memoir “the full colonoscopy.” A colleague had to call up Emily Gould, whose husband, Keith Gessen, had written an essay about the birth of their first child. He described a geyser of blood effusing from his wife during labor. The checker asked Gould about the purported effluence. Gould ended the conversation.

Humor can short-circuit the checking machinery. When a humorist and a checker click, they stick together. Anne Stringfield used to check Steve Martin’s Shouts & Murmurs. They ended up married. Usually, things go the other way. I once took part in a closing meeting during which we debated, for ten minutes, whether Michael Schulman’s use of the phrase “assless chaps” was redundant and meaningless; technically speaking, all chaps are assless.

“I find that often a fact checker forces you to tie a knot in the sentence unnecessarily,” David Sedaris told me. One of his essays describes a trip to a small-town Costco, where he bought “a gross of condoms.” The checker said that, actually, he hadn’t: Costco doesn’t sell a gross, which is a hundred and forty-four. “So I made it ‘a mess’ of condoms, which just made them sound used,” he said. “If the essay was about how many condoms Costco sells, definitely, have the exact number. But this was about my experience being gay in a small Southern town. Can you let me have this?” Humorists can infuriate the checkers, who recognize that even funny nonfiction has to be completely real; it’s held to the same standard as anything else. Last year, Jane Bua checked a Sedaris essay about meeting the Pope. She checked a detail about the color of the buttons on a cardinal’s cassock so assiduously (the department’s perception), or maddeningly (Sedaris’s), that he e-mailed his editor, “Can you slip her a sedative?” Sedaris has complained, “Checking is like being fucked in the ass by a hot thermos.” Bua mentioned this to the checker on Sedaris’s next piece, Yinuo Shi. Shi considered the analogy and said, “If a thermos works, the outside wouldn’t be hot.”

Like darkness retreats, or ayahuasca, checking tends to alter the way you think; it’s also usually enjoyed for a limited time. A few make a career of it. One of the first hires Harold Ross made for the checking department, in 1929, was a man named Freddie Packard. Packard initially worked under Rogers Whitaker. After Packard had missed a “boner,” as an error was called, Whitaker forced Packard to memorize and recite the galley page. Ross esteemed Packard and relied on him; he also started him on a salary equivalent to about twenty-nine thousand dollars today. (Checking salaries remained borderline unlivable until the magazine’s staff unionized, in 2018.) Packard left for Europe during the war. Ross begged him to return. “JOB WIDE OPEN STOP,” Ross wired. “ARE YOU AVAILABLE STOP CAN PAY MORE THAN FORMERLY STOP.” Packard became the first real head of fact checking, a position he held until shortly before his death, in 1974. That’s a long time checking facts. There are many checkers today in the Packard mold. He spoke multiple languages. He commanded a vast sphere of knowledge. He lived in fear that around every corner loomed catastrophe. One week, a colleague noticed Packard moping around the office and asked what was wrong. Packard said he had two colds.

Perhaps the most revered of all checkers was Martin Baron, who put in thirty-six years. Baron was gentle, fatherly, and prim. Alex Ross once wrote a piece mentioning a minor Mozart canon titled “Leck mich im Arsch.” Baron stayed up late combing through Mozart biographies so he wouldn’t have to call a Mozart scholar and repeat the phrase “lick me in the ass.” He was almost pathologically punctilious. The checkers loved Baron. He’d bestow upon them honorifics, as in Professor Seligman or Dr. Kelley. He felt that, as a checker, he should avoid errors at all times. John McPhee said, “Somebody told me, ‘The thing you’ve got to know about Martin Baron, he is always right. And take that literally.’ If a Shakespeare play was mentioned in a piece, he would have to go and check the author’s name.” By the end, he’d spent so much time checking that he had difficulty making any assertions at all. He would phrase statements as questions: Wouldn’t you say it’s a nice day? After Baron’s death, Ian Frazier recalled, “Gesturing to the water below the window, he once said to me, ‘I think that’s the Hudson River.’ ”

The job wears on people in different ways. Some checkers find it difficult to sleep. The novelist Susan Choi, a onetime checker, recalled colleagues vomiting out of stress. In the nineties, everyone smoked cigarettes by the gross. (Anna is letting me have this “gross”: “King Zog of Albania reportedly smoked a hundred and fifty cigarettes daily.”) It’s a job for the anxious. The next boner is always lurking out there, in the dark. I was once assigned a piece by Ben Taub that mentioned Lake Victoria’s four thousand miles of shoreline. Thirty seconds of Googling confirmed the fact, but the exact circumference varied, slightly, between sources. Why? I contacted Stuart E. Hamilton, a professor of geography and geosciences at Salisbury University. “It is a horribly confusing answer and involves physics and fractals,” he told me. This is called the coastline paradox, an offshoot of Zeno’s paradox. “Do not go down that rabbit hole,” Hamilton warned. “Everything is infinity long if you have a small enough ruler.” This is the checker’s paradox, too. The more you know, the more you know that there is more you don’t know. The facts of the universe are infinity long. You either let this drive you crazy or you adjust your ruler size. Taub’s detail ran as “more than four thousand miles of jagged shoreline,” and I never lost sleep over checking again.

Some people greet a New Yorker correction as they would an eclipse. In 1994, several errors appeared in a Talk of the Town piece. The magazine issued a correction, which several publications reported as if it were a seminal event. Hendrik Hertzberg went to the library to investigate. “This was not the first correction in the magazine’s history, it was roughly the three hundredth,” he reported. He added, “Every great journalistic enterprise occasionally makes errors.” I can confirm. Since that first correction, I let through some more. I will not name the figure, to avoid startling Anna.

People like finding errors in the magazine, probably because the magazine is so smug about its fact checking. Checking does contain an element of theatre—a performance of over-the-top diligence that burnishes a myth but doesn’t always correlate with accuracy. Checking isn’t a marketing ploy, exactly, but it is good marketing. To some, it’s just artifice. In the eighties, the writer Alastair Reid admitted to devising composite characters and scenes: combining multiple real details into one fake one. Shouldn’t checking have caught that? Afterward, Michael Kinsley, the editor of The New Republic, wrote of meeting a New Yorker fact checker at a party: “This fellow—a real individual, not a composite—regaled the gathering with tales of chartering airplanes to measure the distance between obscure Asian capitals, sending battalions of Sarah Lawrence girls to count the grains of sand on a particular beach referred to in an Ann Beattie story, and suchlike tales of heroic valor in the pursuit of perfect accuracy.” Kinsley went on: