In the spring of 1981, a 12-year-old boy was beaten and forced to watch as his 11-year-old female cousin was raped by a stranger in a park in Cleveland, Ohio. Several weeks later, a man named Raymond Fowler was stopped by a ranger for running a stop sign in the same park and brought into the police station for questioning. After hesitating for 10 and 15 minutes, respectively, both the boy and the girl eventually chose...
The Wrong Stuff
Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - 10:20am
Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - 9:54am
Whatever else you want to say about it, wrongness is a capacious subject. Since this blog began, I've interviewed people about the relationship between error and medicine,...
Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - 9:47am
Google, the company, entered this world in 1998. I'm not sure how long it took for "Google," the verb, to follow, but I do know that millions of people engage in that particular activity many, many times per day. For half of all Internet users worldwide, Google is the portal to the collected and digitized wisdom (and folly) of humanity. Google's search engine has changed how we conduct research, plan vacations, resolve arguments, find old acquaintances, and check...
Saturday, July 31, 2010 - 6:04pm
After Google, Wikipedia might be the single most powerful new influence on how we as a culture organize, disseminate, and access information. For millions of Web-connected citizens, the online encyclopedia is the place of first resort for looking up everything from Shirley Sherrod to sickle-cell anemia. There's no...
Saturday, July 31, 2010 - 5:59pm
I love asking people about their relationship to being wrong. But there are some folks I'll never get to interview -- no matter how much I want to, no matter how many publicists or PR people I beg. I'm thinking about subjects who can't talk to me for the very good reason that they're dead. Or for the very good reason that they never existed: like cemetaries, libraries are populated with fictional characters whose thoughts on wrongness I wish I could hear. ...
Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - 12:18pm
Name a high-stakes industry, and odds are James Bagian has been involved in trying to make it safer. Bagian is, among other things, an engineer, an anesthesiologist, a NASA astronaut (he was originally scheduled to be on the fatal Challenger mission), a private pilot, an Air Force-qualified freefall parachutist, and a mountain-rescue instructor. And that's to say nothing of his current job: director of the Veteran Administration's National Center for Patient Safety...
Friday, June 25, 2010 - 3:10pm
"When you first contacted me about an interview on errors, I made the error of excessive self-esteem. I thought for a second that you thought I was a sagacious personage who had led a not uneventful life that might have something useful to say to your readers. But then when you mentioned [Alan] Dershowitz, it came to me in a flash....
Friday, June 25, 2010 - 3:06pm
There's a select number of places on earth where you really, really don't want to make a mistake. High on the list, in every sense, are the planet's tallest mountains: the 14 peaks in the world that are over 8,000 meters (26,247 feet).
Widely acknowledged as one of the world's greatest mountaineers, Ed Viesturs is one of fewer than 20 people and the only American to have climbed all of those peaks—and one of only five to have climbed them without...
Thursday, June 10, 2010 - 5:05pm
Every episode of the radio show This American Life has, host Ira Glass suggests, "a crypto-theme." There's whatever the story appears to be about -- the financial crisis, evangelical Christianity,...
Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - 8:34pm
Anthony Bourdain's first nonfiction book, Kitchen Confidential, introduced the world to a kind of one-man alt-FDA: a six-foot-four-inch executive chef and former heroin addict who wrote like Kerouac by way of Blackbeard and would gladly fillet your sorry ass with his own kitchen knife if you showed up late to work...
Okay, maybe you don’t have strong beliefs about the “right” way to load a dishwasher, or about your sweetheart’s propensity to do it “wrong.” In that case, either you are unusually saintly or (like me) you don’t own a dishwasher. But you almost certainly get involved in domestic disputes about who’s right and who’s wrong all the time; we all do. Although interpersonal arguments can have a number of causes – from serious and painful breaches in trust to the fact that we haven’t had our coffee yet – an impressive number of them amount to a tug-of-war over who possesses the truth. We fight over the right to be right.
