Exit Interview: Dead People I Wish I Could Interview About Being Wrong

Submitted by Kathryn Schulz on Sat, 07/31/2010 - 16:59

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.  Over on Slate, temporary home to this blog, I propose some great candidates for dead / imaginary interviewees, and ask readers to submit their own.  You can check out the results here.  

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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.