The New Yorker’s fact-checking department is singular. Unlike the few similar departments of other magazines, it’s got a bit of glam. People actually aspire to work there. And why not? How many fact-checking departments can claim to have been chronicled in the magazine’s own pages by John McPhee or depicted—for better or worse—in Bright Lights, Big City? It’s been at the top of the fact heap for years, at least in part for its absurd levels of rigor. As an editor noted not long ago, “Every quote, every detail, every attribution, every everything is checked for accuracy”—including the cartoons. READ MORE

Hitler ¹
Kony ²
Anne Frank ³
Michele Bachmann ⁴
Ralph Sampson ⁵
"This Jeremy Lin Nigga" ⁶ READ MORE

Since its founding, The New Republic has been issuing opinions about when and where the United States should go to war. What follows is a survey of some of the positions taken by the magazine's editors and columnists on a number of military interventions, stretching from World War I through this week's Leon Wieseltier piece on Syria. (Note: This history is admittedly incomplete, with gaps where archives weren't available online.) READ MORE

Tweeted her.¹
Translated her.²
Gave in at last, I did indeed.³ READ MORE

The counterrevolution.¹ READ MORE

Fraud.¹
Moron.²
Shill.³
Homeboy.⁴
Mac.⁵
Judge.⁶
Mermaid.⁷
Brain in a vat!⁸
Robot.⁹
Chunk of malicious code.¹⁰
Nazi.¹¹
Loser.¹²
Youngster with issues.¹³
Farmer.¹⁴
$20 million start-up carrier.¹⁵
Famous magazine editor!¹⁶
Heeb.¹⁷
Hobbit.¹⁸
Werewolf.¹⁹
Watchdog.²⁰
55-year-old Teamster masquerading as a college coed.²¹
Cecil.²²
God.²³
Human—until you fill out a captcha.²⁴ READ MORE

Opposition research—political Dumpster diving perfected by Lee Atwater and Roger Stone—has been a part of American politics for nearly 200 years. Your familiarity with Willie Horton, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and John Edwards' $400 haircut is a tribute to its irritating persistence as a campaign tool. What follows is oppo research, but we do not aim to inflict damage. In fact, The Awl's effort, a collection of early media mentions of the Republican candidates (sometimes appearing under their given names), may actually endear these Presidential hopefuls to you. Or am I the only one charmed by 11-year-old zoo booster Newton Gingrich? READ MORE

That a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.¹ READ MORE

Very little happens in Brooklyn Heights. During Truman Capote’s years here, his friends would enquire, “But what do you do over there?” It was a fair question—and an eternal one. Mine wonder the same thing. One pleasure of America’s first suburb is that it is, to an extent unusual in an ever-churning city, impervious to change—economically, structurally, but also in a more fundamental sense: The question, Did anything happen in the Heights today? can almost always be answered with Not much. The news is blessedly mundane: Either a pet is missing or the street’s been sullied by a fallen tree or pothole. READ MORE

Out of pique or posturing authors occasionally disparage their early work. Saul Bellow referred to his pre-Augie output, Dangling Man and The Victim, as his Masters and PhD, respectively; “I find them plaintive, sometimes querulous,” he told The Paris Review. Anthony Burgess, 23 years and 30-some-odd novels after the publication of A Clockwork Orange, groused, “The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate,” and impugned it as “a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks[.]” John Steinbeck was only slightly more charitable towards Cup of Gold: A life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History, his 1929 first novel, calling it “an immature experiment written for the purpose of getting … all the autobiographical material (which hounds us until we get it said) out of my system.” READ MORE