Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

Lacking an umbrella, I returned to the car at a flat run, threw open the door, and flung my sopping self into the backseat—to the visible astonishment and considerable alarm of the total stranger who was sitting there nursing her infant. It was, you will have surmised, the wrong car. I extricated myself, extremely rapidly and extremely inelegantly; in my final glimpse of the woman, she hadn’t yet altered the stunned look on her face, or slackened her protective grip on her baby. When I found my way to the right car, my sister, who had been following my mad dash at a distance (whether it was too much of a distance to warn me of my impending mistake or whether she was simply curious to see what would happen is a point of some contention), was still convulsed with hysterical laughter. No question about it: being wrong can be funny. And a cruel but indisputable corollary: other people being wrong can be very, very funny. If, at the end of the last chapter, you wondered what I meant by embracing error strictly for the pleasure of experiencing it, this kind of humor is part of it. As we’ll see in a moment, wrongness and comedy are entwined at the roots. And not just wrongness and comedy: also wrongness and art, wrongness and learning, wrongness and individuality—even wrongness and survival.