Many books aren’t fact-checked, and we’re increasingly realizing they’re full of errors

Many books aren’t fact-checked, and we’re increasingly realizing they’re full of errors

Jun 05 2019

Writing in Vox, Kelsey Piper looks at the growing concern about "books by prestigious and well-regarded researchers" which "go to print with glaring errors, which are only discovered when an expert in the field, or someone on Twitter, gets a glance at them."

She cites two examples:

In Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love, author Naomi Wolf's entire premise is based on a misunderstanding of the phrase "death recorded," which she took to mean that the person had been executed, but in fact means that the death penalty was deferred for their natural life.

And in Happy Every After, one of author Paul Dolan's central premises is that "Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: f***ing miserable..." This statement is based on a misunderstanding of the American Time Use Survey, a national survey available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which defines "spouse absent" as no longer living in the household--which is very different to Dolan's interpretation of the spouse not present at the time of the interview!

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