- Trying to crowd-source a cure for brain cancer.
- Interview with Aaron Blaisdell about Ancestral Health Symposiums
- Plagiarism Today, a website.
- Plagiarism averted
- Better late than never. By having him do a Fiction Podcast, the editors of The New Yorker finally acknowledge that David Sedaris is a fabulist. Treating his stories as if they actually happened (putting them under Personal History, not Fiction) was a curious editorial decision for a magazine that fact-checks poetry. Step 2 toward more New Yorker editorial honesty: Book excerpts are labelled as such.
- self-experimentation workshop in Silicon Valley
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Interesting point about Sedaris. I read a couple of his books long ago and I can’t say I ever thought about it at the time (I see now that I missed a big 2007 story about this in TNR) …but thinking back now it’s obvious that his stories must have been heavily embellished.
I wonder who the most honest modern memoirists are. Even more, I wonder why the non-fiction label is so valuable. So much celebrated fiction is semi-autobiographical that there’s clearly an audience for that too, but I guess the audience for “memoirs” is larger or less crowded?
Seth: I think the non-fiction label is valuable because other things equal a true story is more impressive than a fictional one. For example, “I was kidnapped by aliens.” If true, much more impressive.