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The book you’re reading might be wrong

by HealthMatters May 9, 2024, 11:11 pm 1.9k Views

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If Kristi Noem never actually met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, then how did that anecdote make it into her memoir? The answer, after these three stories from The Atlantic:

The Art of the Check

The newsletter you’re reading right now was reviewed by a fact-checker named Sam. Sam spent about an hour this afternoon scrutinizing my words and sentences, and making sure the quotes from my interviews match my recordings. You know what probably didn’t get that kind of review? The book on your nightstand. Or, as it happens, Noem’s new memoir.

Book publishers don’t employ fact-checking teams, and they don’t require a full fact-check before publication. Instead, a book is usually reviewed only by editors and copy editors—people who shape the story’s structure, word choice, and grammar. An editor might catch something incorrect in the process, and a lawyer might examine some claims in the book to ensure that the publisher won’t be sued for defamation. But that’s it. University presses typically use a peer-review process that helps screen for any factual errors. But in publishing more broadly, no one checks every date, quote, or description. It works this way at all of the Big Five publishers, which include HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, and Macmillan. (None of these publishers responded to my requests for comment.)

Whaaat?! you might be thinking, spitting that Thursday glass of merlot all over your screen as every book you’ve ever read flashes before your eyes. Was it all a lie? The answer is no. But books absolutely do go out into the world containing factual errors. For most books, and especially for memoirs, “it’s up to the author to turn in a manuscript that is accurate,” Jane Friedman, a publishing-industry reporter, told me.

A few writers will go out and pay for their own fact-checker. Many don’t—including, evidently, Noem, who, as you may have heard by now, shot her dog in a gravel pit. That incident, which the South Dakota governor wrote about in her memoir, No Going Back, seems to be true. But a passage about the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is probably not. In the book, Noem claims to have met Kim during a congressional trip where he “underestimated” her. At least one former congressional staffer has said that that meeting never happened. And after being questioned about it, Noem’s office said it would be correcting a few errors in the book.

A simple fact-check could have prevented this particular embarrassment for Noem: A checker would have called others who were part of the delegation to verify whether the meeting had taken place. So why don’t publishers fact-check, to avoid this problem in the first place? From the publisher’s perspective, hiring a team of checkers is “a huge expense,” Friedman said—it would “destroy the profitability” of some books. And there are logistical challenges: Fact-checking memoirs, for example, can be difficult, because you’re dealing with people’s memories. But magazines do it all the time.

If authors want their work checked, they generally have to pay for it themselves. Many of my Atlantic colleagues have hired fact-checkers to review their books. But the process is cumbersome and expensive—the editorial equivalent of an “intensive colonoscopy,” as one colleague described it to me recently. The checker pores over every word and sentence of the book, using multiple sources to back up each fact. She listens to all of the author’s audio, reviews transcripts, and calls people to verify quotes. The whole process can take several weeks. One fact-checker I spoke with charges $5,000 to $8,000 for a standard nonfiction book. Others charge more. It makes sense, then, that, as Friedman said, the number of authors who opt for independent fact-checking “is minuscule.”

So what of Noem’s book? Her publisher, Center Street, which is a conservative imprint of Hachette, had a decision to make when the error was discovered: It could conduct an emergency recall of Noem’s books, pulling all of them back from bookstores and Amazon warehouses around the country, and print new, accurate copies, Kathleen Schmidt, a public-relations professional who writes the Substack newsletter Publishing Confidential, explained to me. But that would have been incredibly difficult, she said, given the logistics and extreme expense of both shipping and paper. Center Street issued a statement saying it would remove the Kim anecdote from the audio and ebook versions of No Going Back, as well as from any future reprints. (Noem’s team did not reply to a request for comment about her fact-checking process.)

This means that, for now, Noem’s book, which was officially released on Tuesday, will exist in the world as is. Many people will buy it, read it, and accept as fact that Noem once met—and was underestimated by—Kim Jong Un.

Books have always had a certain heft to them—sometimes literally, but also metaphorically. We tend to believe a book’s contents by virtue of their vessel. “People might be a little less likely to do that if they understood that the publisher is basically just publishing whatever the author said was correct,” Friedman told me.

Maybe this latest incident will spark a change in the publishing industry—but it probably won’t. For now, people should think critically about everything they read, remembering, Friedman said, “that [books] are fallible—as fallible as anything else.”

Related:

Today’s News

Last night, President Joe Biden said that if Israel launches a large-scale invasion of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, the U.S. would stop supplying Israel with certain weapons and artillery shells.
House Democrats overwhelmingly joined Republicans in rejecting Representative Majorie Taylor Greene’s motion to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s 18-year-old son, was selected to be a Florida delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he will participate in nominating his father for president.

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Evening Read

An illustration of a uterus, silhouetted, with a feminine face superimposed in the middle — Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic

A Fundamental Stage of Human Reproduction Is Shifting

By Katherine J. Wu

In recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.

Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.