Last week I dedicated a few posts (1, 2, 3, 4) to a column by George Will on global warming as an example of why fact-checking is important. The whole thing flared up a lot more than I had expected, with the Washington Post editorial page folks actually claiming they had fact checked Will through a “multi-layered” fact-checking process. (Unfortunately, no one bothered to pick up a phone to call a research center cited in the piece.) Etc., etc.

I’ve been too busy with many deadlines on other projects to keep close track of this any longer, but I just had to pass on this bit of news from Talking Points Memo: George Will is back, baby!

Continue reading “George Will: Locked In Ice!” →

Here are excerpts from the panel discussion on the brain I moderated at the Franklin Institute. The scurrilous rumor about me and toy soldiers pops up about 4 minutes into Sam Wang’s discussion of false memories. 

Originally published February 26, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

My latest book, Microcosm, is about what it means to be alive, as seen from the point of view of E. coli. So it was a jolt to the system to discover that the guy who basically wrote the book on E. coli has just reviewed it for the American Society for Microbiology’s journal, Microbe. Frederick Neidhardt of the University of Michigan is the editor-in-chief of Escherichia coli and Salmonella: Cellular and Molecular Biology. I relied on this 2898-page tome a lot while I worked on Microcosm, lugging the two volumes off the shelf at the Yale med school library and dropping them with a crash on my table.

Continue reading “A “Whoa…” Review of Microcosm” →

[Correction appended]

There’s been a wrinkle in the global warming fact-checking saga I’ve been following this week.

Just to recap–George Will wrote a column claiming that global warming’s a lot of hype. He made a number of misleading statements, including one that was rejected by the very scientists he claimed as his source.

Will stated, “According to the University of Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

Continue reading “A Wrinkle In Ice (or Not)” →

While recovering from an extracted wisdom tooth this morning, I cheered up when I saw that Talking Points Memo and other blogs have picked up my grousing about George Will’s error-laden global warming column in the Washington Post. When I first became aware of Will’s column on Monday, it seemed to me the perfect example of the general problem with treating op-ed pages as “opinion.” That is, if by opinion, you mean that someone doesn’t have to adhere to the facts. I could state that the Earth is 6000 years old, and no one would dare correct me, because it’s just my opinion.

Continue reading “You Call That Fact-Checking?” →