A few words about errors: the kind journalists make, how to think about them, what to do about them. This past year has been the Year of the Error for the journalism trade. Not Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair kinds of errors-those are not really errors but, for the most part, fabrications. Nor errors of Read More
It will be interesting to see if The New York Times puts Donald Foster’s astonishing retraction of his famous “Shakespearean discovery” on the front page-the way the Times front-paged the professor’s original claim. But Mr. Foster’s remarkable reversal, and his remarkably graceful admission of error-unreported in the press till now-is big news with major implications Read More
The new Star Wars movie is coming. Perhaps you’ve heard.
In little more than a month, George Lucas’ vast, digitally rendered sci-fi fantasy will hit the screens to the kind of unblinking hosannas never before accorded a movie made essentially for kids. And like some fin de siècle sci-fi-pics-that-would-be- Star Wars (see–better yet, don’t– Read More
Exciting new developments in the controversy over the alleged “Shakespeare” Funeral Elegy . This is becoming more than a scholars’ squabble. It’s turning out to be one of the great emblematic intellectual debates of our time. A dispute about more than the authorship of a relentlessly inept, clumsily sententious 578-line poem signed in 1612 with Read More
