A Mistake Too Amusing To Let Stand

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.