Truth Doesn't Scale

Still from Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly.

I’ve been fact-checked. It’s an uncomfortable experience but also therapeutic. One has one’s flaws exposed — sloppiness, overreaching, wrong-headedness, impetuousness, ignorance, peevishness — and dealt with. Nothing gets swept under the rug; it all has to be resolved on the page, in public view. One emerges from a rigorous fact checking a chastened, and maybe a better, writer and man. And one avoids the embarrassment of the printed error, the u...