You were not born yesterday. Be skeptical as editor and reader

In a time when widespread disinformation appears to be overtaking widespread misinformation, you would do well to read and edit cautiously and skeptically. Here are some guidelines.

AREAS REQUIRING CAUTION ABOUT ACCURACY

Names: Persons and places, formal titles, job descriptions.

Numbers: Percentages, averages, rates, ratios, polling data.

Chronology: Comprehensible sequence of events, reader’s orientation in place and time. 

Sources: Credibility, bias, independent confirmation. 

Superlatives: First, only, biggest, oldest. 

Photographs: Genuine or altered. 

Links: Veracity of other sites. 

Inconsistencies: Not only in factual details, but also in vocabulary, syntax, or tone. 

Legal issues: Assertions of illegal or illicit actions. Evidence?

Headlines: Accurate? Oversimplified? Slanted?

SELF-EXAMINATION

Confirmation bias: Reading selectively to focus on data confirming what we already think. 

Backfire effect: Strong reaction to challenges to deeply held beliefs or opinions, with the effect of reinforcing them. 

Biased assimilation: Interpreting new information to make it fit existing beliefs.

Motivated reasoning: Finding persuasive what already fits existing beliefs and reserving criticism for contradictory details and evidence.  

Group polarization: Tendency in discussion to be pulled toward the people expressing the strongest views. 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE QUESTIONS

What is the source/evidence? Reliable? Independently confirmed?

What is the history of the persons and entities involved?

Who else is saying this?

What need does it fit?

What is the motivation?

Does it meet our standards? 

How do we add value?

DANGER AREAS

Story is too good. Factual details and quotes are perfect, fitting all expectations. 

Publishing in haste. Shortcutting the questioning to get the story out ahead of everyone else. 

Writer is a star. Privileged employee exempted from strong questioning and challenges.

Everyone is on board.  Consensus can be hard to challenge.  

Bad behavior in public? Summon a mob

 If you have been on social media the past few days, you know the story. Video shows a woman confronting a father and son at a baseball game and insisting on taking a ball from the son. Since then her image has been widely circulated, with calls that she be identified, fired from her job, and disgraced into perpetuity. 

I offer no further details; I am not interested in the story itself but in what the spread of the story shows us about ourselves. 

I can't say with authority that bad behavior in public has become more common, but I am sure that the prevalence of cellphones and video surveillance has made accounts of bad behavior in public increasingly common. 

And spreading without perspective. A woman bullying a kid and parent into giving up a baseball at a ballpark gets the same widespread indignant comment as someone shouting racial abuse at Black or Latino persons and trying to get them arrested or deported, or threatening physical violence. Perhaps lack of confidence in government and institutions prompts people to go on these vigilante jags, and a public that seems increasingly angry also appears to be increasingly eager to find subjects on which to vent that anger--with a lack of any oversight or norms leaving one wondering whether justice is actually served. 

Then there is the Karen thing. The woman at the ballpark has been repeatedly called a Karen, which has become a widespread pejorative term for a middle-class woman, usually white, who is caught in public displaying behavior that is entitled, demanding, and obnoxious. As these Karen reports multiply online, it is hard not to see that to the class issue has been added a tincture of something very much like misogyny. 

People who circulate these reports of bad behavior might consider whether the bad behavior is limited to the subjects. 

Discoveries

 Some forty-odd years ago, I picked up a copy of Amy Clampitt's The Kingfisher from the slush pile of books to be reviewed at The Cincinnati Enquirer. I chose it because I had seen and liked one of her poems in The New Yorker. 

That book has been shifted from place to place, apartment to house, unread, for four decades. This week I picked it up, began to read it, and discovered that it is astonishingly good. That should have been obvious because Richard Wilbur, whose taste was infallible, proclaimed it astonishingly good in the copy on the dust jacket. 

One touch: 

"Grief / is original, but it / repeats itself; there's nothing / more original that it can do."

I wonder, can you name a book whose belated discovery has overpowered you with its quality? 

Cracker Barrel culture will not nourish you

 When my grandfather, John H. McIntyre, died in 1945, my father, Raymond McIntyre, took over the operation of his general store in Elizaville, Kentucky. It was a going concern. 

For one thing, Elizaville, population about 100, was on the road from Maysville to Lexington. Travelers would stop at the store for cheese, cold cuts, and snacks because of the lack of restaurants along the highway. On Saturdays, people from outlying farms would come to the store to shop and socialize. My older sister remembers that my father and Eugene Wood, who owned the general store across the street, would compete for customers by hiring musicians on Saturday nights. 

All that is gone. When U.S. 68 between Maysville and Lexington was built, much of the automobile traffic dried up. The early supermarkets in Flemingsburg, the county seat, had a broader array of stock that drew away the customers. Today both general stores in Elizaville have been closed for years, though in the past year a Dollar Store opened in town. 

I am reminded of this lost era by the furor on over Cracker Barrel's rebranded logo. 

Cracker Barrel is a chain of restaurants trafficking in manufactured nostalgia. Customers enter and leave the restaurant through a shop brimming with tacky tchotchkes. The menu in the restaurant evokes the plain country cooking of the remembered (and imagined) past. Once, years ago, I got a perfectly good slice of country ham with my eggs. Two years ago when I ate at another Cracker Barrel, country ham was no longer on the menu and I had to wonder why anyone would patronize a restaurant that could not competently bake a potato. 

The old logo included a man in a chair leaning on a barrel; the revised logo simply displays the words "Cracker Barrel," and there lies the source of the outrage. 

The person leaning on the barrel in the old logo is an older white man, and his removal feeds into white people's apprehension of being overtaken by non-whites, their dominant culture diminished and supplanted. 

And so it goes. The demographics are clear: White people are well on the way to becoming a minority in the U.S. population, and it is a fantasy that the Trump administration can deport enough non-whites and right-wing influencers can gin up enough of a white population boom to counter these trends. Establishing some kind of apartheid might be attempted, but South Africa already tried that and we know how it came out. The current administration is addicted to performative stunts to intimidate non-whites and prop up white people's shaky sense of self, but stunts wear off fast and new ones have to be concocted. 

White people have been leaving the country for the cities over the past century, and our culture is coming out of the city rather than the farm. Black people have been here for five centuries and are not going away. Brown people are here doing the kinds of work that white people don't care to do, and won't do. A return to the white-dominant culture of the 1950s cannot be imposed from above and is not going to happen. 

If Cracker Barrel is the best you can come up with to exemplify and defend your values, you need to get out more. 

In case you missed it ...

 With all the claims on your time, along with your wide reading, it seems possible that you have not been assiduous in following this blog. Always seeking to be helpful, I have assembled a set of links to previous posts that you may find merit a look. 

Despite everything you have been told, life on the copy desk was good. 

The principles copy editors follow.

The twenty-year decline of The Baltimore Sun.

Unlearning is part of the job. 

The journalists' superstition that refuses to die. 

I know people hate that. Here is one reason not to. 

If you can indulge me, I reflect on the destruction of the family farmhouse. 

Just pick up a book

 It has been a dreary summer in Baltimore, too damn hot to venture out of doors when it was not pouring down raining. Then a week of a vile summer cold, followed by a week of bronchitis. Thank God for books and the Enoch Pratt Free Library. 

Earlier this year I got hold of Daniel Okrent's The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. The account of the federally imposed immigration quotas of the 1920s seems like fresh reading today, with white people apprehensive of being overcome by a flood of non-white immigrants. (Take some comfort in progress: Over the past century Italians and other European immigrants got to be honorary white people.) 

Jill Lepore's The Deadline: Essays reprints 46 essays previously published in The New Yorker, each one a gem of insight and lucid writing. Once you start it, you will inevitably read it through. 

Nick Harkaway is the son of David Cornwell, whom you probably know as John le Carre. His book, Karla's Choice, slides neatly into the chronology of Le Carre's Smiley novels. If you enjoyed Tinker, Tailor and the others, you will find that Harkaway does not dishonor the tradition. 

Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power tends to play down Jefferson's inveterate duplicity as mainly a reflection of his reserved character, but he is on the mark in pointing out Jefferson's unfailing instinct to use power when it comes into his hands. And Meacham gives full credit to Jefferson's substantial accomplishments, which today we tend to overlook because his awareness of the evil of slavery did not stop him from benefiting from it. 

Rereading John Keegan's account of the Battle of Trafalgar in The Price of Admiralty, I realized that I had somehow neglected to look into Six Armies in Normandy, his account of the invasion to the liberation of Paris. We generally know it from The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, but Keegan pieces together the story from six different perspectives to give us a much fuller sense of what happened in the spring of 1944. (If you have access to A.J. Liebling's Normandy Revisited, which has been reprinted in the collection Liebling Abroad, read his account of being present at the liberation. "In the Place d'Orleans, just within the city limits, we came upon a sight unique in my experience--thousands of people, tens of thousands, all demonstrably happy. In any direction we looked, there was an unending vista of people. It was like an entry into Paradise. ...")

I'm not sure that we in the United States believe in education any longer, what with the universities ditching courses in the humanities on their headlong rush to become trade school limited to STEM and business administration. But Tara Westover's Educated, a memoir of a woman brought up in a survivalist Mormon family who, at great personal struggle, acquires for herself a college education, should remind you about the value to place on actual education rather than the simple-minded indoctrination our current masters advocate. 

Just for fun, I picked up Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. It's still hilarious. 

Tais-toi, Karoline

 The marginally literate White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week that the French should be "grateful" to the United States that they are "not speaking German." 

It is a plain fact that the United States exists as an independent nation because of support from France during the Revolution. People who read books* may be aware from Stacy Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America that American diplomats, principally Benjamin Franklin, kept alive the flow of money and, ultimately, military power that secured our independence. It was, in further fact, that this enormous support bankrupted the French crown, a factor leading to their own revolution. 

Yes, the French collapsed as the Germans invaded in 1940, and yes, it was Americans among the Allied forces that liberated the country in 1944, but the French decorate the graves of U.S. soldiers in Normandy every year. 

France is our oldest ally, and it does not merit cheap slurs from the White House briefing room.  

*I realize that this excludes the bulk of the current administration. 

I took a vacation; there will be no slides

Last month Kathleen and I joined her sibs, Linda and Paul Capcara, and their spouses for a trip to the Capcara homeland in the hinterlands of northern Slovakia and Poland. Friends have urged me to post an account, and though I am skeptical of your interest, here it is.  

Before the homeland we treated ourselves to Budapest, Vienna, and Prague.

In order, Budapest was very agreeable. We toured the massive Dohany Street Synagogue (second-largest in the world), the Parliament, and the central market, which was full of sausages and hams and paprika. We arrived to tour St. Stephen's Cathedral just as the last Pentecost morning Mass was ending, with incense permeating the place and an organ sounding with vibrations you could feel through the soles of your feet. 

Vienna was, of course, elegant and charming, though as imposing as the Habsburg palaces are, they are plainly meant for large formal occasions, and it is difficult to imagine human beings actually living in them. The Staatsoper was gorgeous, and the Viennese know how to produce an opera, with musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, elaborate sets, and crowds of extras swarming over the stage. The opera, regrettably, was, Rosenkavalier, but the performance was first rate. (If it had been Nozze di Figaro, I would have happily died on the spot.)

Prague captured my heart, in part because the pilsner was the finest I've ever drunk. Outside the opera house, which we weren't able to enter, there is a small memorial to the premiere of Don Giovanni there. In the tour of Prague Castle, we were at one point in the room where the Third Denefestration of Prague occurred, and I was able to touch the frame of the window through which the Bohemians flung the Catholic Austrian delegates and started the Thirty Years' War. We toured St. Nicholas Church, a Baroque beauty acquired by the Hussite Church; they observe the seven sacraments, deny the authority of the Vatican, and ordain women and bishops. Close to Anglican. 

The Capcara homeland in the Carpathians turned out to be more pleasant than I had expected. After marching through the daily itinerary in the cities, the lodge where we stayed in northern Slovakia was relaxing: fresh mountain air, spring-fed streams running down the hills, time to relax. 

The homeland (which included Andy Warhol's hometown) turned out to be a series of villages, some as small as a dozen houses with a Greek Catholic or Orthodox church with an iconostasis from floor to ceiling and a cemetery. We discovered, after some confusion, that the family name in those parts is actually pronounced "Sapsara." We found a couple of people with knowledge of a Capcara great-grandmother and some grave markers with family names. 

We had arranged through a cousin for a Polish tour guide, and at the end of the tour he said his mother would like to give us lunch. The six of us sat down at the table while this short, gray-haired Polish woman served soup with barley, shredded  pork, and herbs from her garden. After that, the pierogi course: eight glistening cheese-and-potato dumplings on each plate. I ate the entire serving, so as not to offend the house. Then dessert: an apple-walnut cake with chocolate and orange flavoring. I ate three slices, to be polite. 

Many little things remain in memory. The pilsner. The convenience of train travel between European cities. The trams crisscrossing each city. Boats on the Danube and Vlatava. The masses of electricity-generating windmills across the Hungarian plain. The storks nesting on utility poles in Slovakia. And the pilsner. 

Septuagenarian

Granted that I'm elderly, what are you going to call me? "Senior" and "senior  citizen" are just bland, milk-toast terms, so I have looked into the possibilities. 

old-timer That suggests a veteran, an "old hand" who understands how things work. That seems inadequate, since the thing I know how to do, editing, is apparently no longer valued or done. 

codger An affectionate, or mildly derogatory, term, the dictionary says, if you think you can pull off affection and derogation simultaneously. 

coot Old, harmless, and sometimes not bright. I deny "harmless."

fogy Behind the times, overconservative, and slow. Well, you'd have to append "old," because those three qualities are hardly limited to age. 

boomer Since I was born while Harry Truman was president, lumping me with the 1946-1964 tranche of Americans is something I can't very well deny. 

dotard Weak, with limited mental faculties. Not quite yet. 

gaffer I'm not British. 

geezer Odd, eccentric, and unreasonable. I think we may be nearing the mark. 

curmudgeon Crusty, ill-tempered, and difficult. Bingo!

Unless you would like to suggest another.

These just in

 Our job as professional copy editors is to identify and correct your lapses, sparing you public embarrassment. That does not, however, mean that we do not snicker among ourselves. Extracts from desk message traffic: 

"She is not afraid to bawl our teen-agers using fowl language..." sigh. i won't even bother to tell you about "Mount Zion Untied Methodist Church." 

a nominee: 

Line 1 Meatloaf dinner 

Line 2 includes your 

Line 3 choice of potato 

Maimed Professor: "One Decent Typing Hand and an Intact Head All I Need" FANTASTIC! A copy editor you can keep in a filing cabinet!

Photo caption: "Soundless, the mobiles flits in respect to the cows." 

"In its song are the sounds of whirring dragonfly wings and grasses rustling in the hot spring wind: 'Tchi-tchi,tchi, jyuuuu jyuuuuu jyuuuuu jyuuuuuu.'"

N.Y. Times News Service: ORLANDO, Fla. -- Despite a desperate effort that included feeding tubes and an all-night vigil, a rare baby sperm has died two days after it was found stranded on a sandbar. 

b6.1.2 Rabbi passes gas for use in kosher Pepsi Cola 

well, I've been told to sked this story, but based on the lede do you think I'd be justified in simply feigning illness and going home? "WARSAW, Poland -- The Emilia Furniture Emporium epitomizes recent Polish trading history." 

"The house and mill were built around 1746, and the house was of a Maryland-German Hangover-Medieval style." 

"As world markets become increasingly global ..."

"Over the windows are Colonial keystone lentils ..."

"Driving from the north on Route 1, the new 50s-style diner sits atop a hill." the moveable feast 

"Surgeons fashioned each baby a cosmetic naval." Shape up or ship out, kid. 

CALIFORNIA FIRE CONSUME 200 HOMES, INURES 17" People are awfully jaded these days.

"The FAA, Mr. Horne said, takes care of drunken amphibian airplane pilots." FROGS IN THE DRUNK TANK!

"a married, 45-year-old man in western, southern and northeastern Maryland." How fat was he, Johnny?

"Although temporarily covered with plywood, Mr. Dalrymple plans to install two cellar-style doors in the open space." Free at last, free at last.