Expertise actually matters
When you’re an historian, or present yourself as one, it’s expected that you know what you’re talking about. But it turns out that Naomi Wolf’s new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, is premised on her misunderstanding of a Victorian term.
Not only that — but Wolf learns of her mistake live, on-air, during a radio interview.
OUCH.
May 24th, 2019 at 8:13 pm
Irony being what it is, we now live in a world where a high schooler might have made the same discovery without much difficulty. If not for you, in 1993 I would not have become a relatively early adopter of computer and online access technology. Fast forward to the late two-thousand oughts I was adept enough with technology to complete a degree from a 4 year school and get another great job doing what I love to do. While a Rutgers University undergrad, I spent a semester (the whole 16 credits) in evaluating outcomes in the revolution of health care systems. A revolution still in progress. One of the key articles that I relied on had a glaring error in a chart. When I finally confirmed the error, I emailed the publisher at a major California University. The article was already two years old, within a day I received an email from one of the lead physicians thanking me for my discovery and how it had been overlooked for so long. To this day, I go back to the PDF with the error and the revised copy and smile. I was the first person to see the mistake. The article is still heavily cited on every level of study.
May 25th, 2019 at 4:01 am
It gives me a fine, clean, feeling to see someone working with FACTS again. Do you suppose it will catch on?