Susan Choi in The Yale Review:
What i always say is that I wasn’t a very good checker. I don’t mean I made mistakes—mistakes being, in fact-checking, failing to catch someone else’s mistakes. I mean that the things I checked weren’t serious or difficult, that generally, the bar was pretty low. This was at Tina Brown’s New Yorker in the mid-1990s, a time when the magazine was trying to raise its own heart rate. The idea was to make headlines, not just cultural history. But when we had a piece whose publication might result in a lawsuit or an international incident, or a person’s vindication or ruination, or a significant and unanticipated paradigm shift on a matter of collectively agreed-upon importance, such as the Holocaust or Shakespeare, I wasn’t the first checker anyone thought of. My boss—a brilliant, kind, and fair man I still count as a friend—tended to pitch me softballs, an expression I’ve never understood because I didn’t check sports articles either, being equally ignorant about every sport. I tended to check culture pieces: reconsiderations of, say, Maria Callas, for which there was no “peg”—an occasion in the real world that dictated when it should publish—beyond the opera-loving author’s strong feeling that Callas was owed some attention. This was the sort of piece that might long remain in unscheduled limbo, allowing me to bone up on Callas, about whom I knew nothing.
More here.
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