David Remnick, The New Yorker's editor in chief, says the breakdown occurred as the piece was being closed. A question arose about the passage from The Bell Curve, but Gladwell had not submitted the text to the fact-checking department as part of his research materials. "We didn't have time" to find a copy of the book, says Remnick, "and Malcolm thought he was sure of what it said, and we went with it, and we were wrong, and we corrected it."
If you recall,
Writing about I.Q., [Gladwell] claimed that the authors of The Bell Curve, Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray, had called for low-I.Q. individuals be "sequestered" in reservations apart from the general population--in effect, concentration camps.
In fact, Hernstein and Murray had only raised the prospect of such camps in order to criticize it--as the fact-checker assigned to the piece realized.
How rigid, exactly, are The New Yorker's factchecking standards? I ask this because, although I don't have a copy of The Bell Curve with me, I can reproduce the necessary passage (p526):
As you can see, Herrnstein and Murray write that an environment conducive to sequestering would be "more unpleasant--more vicious--than anyone can imagine."
My question: Are the New Yorker factcheckers familiar with Amazon's Online Reader and, if so, why didn't they use it?
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