Freelance writer Ruth Shalit Barrett filed a lawsuit against The Atlantic for $1 million after she claims the outlet smeared her in its retraction of her article.
The New Yorker Fell Into the “Weird Japan” Trap
Elif Batuman was duped by a source’s fabrications about the country’s rent-a-family industry. What went wrong?
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It has not been a good year for anyone, but it’s been an especially bad year for the fact-checkers of highbrow magazines. In November,
The Atlanticappended an extraordinary editor’s note to a story written by Ruth Barrett, née Shalit, disclosing that Barrett, among other exaggerations and falsehoods, had encouraged a source to fabricate details about her life, including that the source had a son when she did not. Barrett came clean, sort of, admitting that “on some level I did know that it was BS” and “I do take responsibility.”