Imagine my glee when I encountered the first paragraph of a story in the dead-tree version of the New York Review of Books:
Tony Judt had a thing about railway trains. We even know from his last book, a brilliant compilation of his ideas on history and politics, distilled just before his untimely death from a series of conversations with Timothy Snyder, that he had wanted to write a history of trains, entitled Locomotion.
I decided then and there to write a blog post, which is not what you are reading now because my plans changed when I sought out the on-line version of the same article and found this:
Tony Judt had a thing about railway trains. We even know from his last book, a brilliant compilation of his ideas on history and politics, distilled from a series of conversations with Timothy Snyder just before his untimely death, that he had wanted to write a history of trains, entitled Locomotion.
Okay, that’s a bit better, now we know that talking to Timothy Snyder was not fatal. But who died? The dead-tree draft at least made it clear that Tony Judt was dead. The on-line version suggests that Timothy Snyder is the dead guy:
“…a series of conversations with Timothy Snyder just before his untimely death…”
The writer (Ian Buruma) seems unable to get out of his own way. So, the snarky blog entry I had intended to write—about an apparently fatal conversation with Timothy Snyder—has expanded.
The expanded scope includes:
- Data quality for narrative data.
- Clarity: A rule of thumb for amateur writers.
- Obviousness in examples—expect stupid rebuttals.
- The ethics of changing already-published material.
I’ll cover these topics in upcoming posts. I’ll add the links to this post as they become available. Stay tuned.
