Regret the Error

Sorry for the spat

An apology from author Richard Dawkins published in yesterday's Guardian:

I am distressed to find myself reported as participating in a "literary spat", and as "pouring scorn" on an individual, comedian Peter Kay, for whom I actually feel nothing but goodwill (Heard the one about the atheist who scorned a comedian for his belief in a comforting God? March 8). The explanation is as follows. I am one of those whom reporters regularly telephone for a soundbite. Last week, I was fed a quotation from somebody, previously unknown to me, who said he believed in God because he found it comforting. Assuming I was one of a panel of usual suspects being asked to comment on this rather common sentiment, I gave my usual response.
Now it seems that I was being set up by a hired publicity machine, so that I would appear to be mounting a personal attack upon a particular individual who is my rival for a literary prize. And I also learn that the quotation they selected is an unrepresentative one from a book I haven't read (I look forward to doing so), which is competing with my own for the same prize. I hope you will allow me publicly to apologise to Peter Kay and wish him well in the competition.
Richard Dawkins
Oxford

The Guardian story that set it off:

It may be the least likely literary spat in history. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist famous for his rottweiler attacks on religion, has poured scorn on Peter Kay, the northern comic best known for a gentle joke about garlic bread.
The comedian and the scientist are rivals in the Galaxy British Book Awards, in which Dawkins is a frontrunner for his bestselling atheist diatribe The God Delusion, and Kay is nominated for his popular memoirs The Sound of Laughter. The controversy erupted after Dawkins read an excerpt from Kay's autobiography, in which he wrote: "I believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting."
The believer-baiting academic responded with contempt. "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?" he said.
"If evidence were found for a supreme being I would change my mind instantly -with pride and with great surprise. Would I find it comforting? What matters is what is true, and we discover truth by evidence, not what we would 'like'." Kay, at present appearing in The Producers at the Palace theatre in Manchester, was unavailable for comment last night and his publicist declined to respond on his behalf.
In fact, while his book has extensive passages on religion, Kay rejects the Catholic church and disputes the divinity of Jesus. The comedian, who was educated at a convent school, writes: "I believe that a man called Jesus did walk the earth at one time but I don't think he was the superhero that the Bible makes him out to be ... I think Jesus was just an ordinary person, like me and you."
He also criticises the teaching of the nuns at his school in Bolton, referring to an episode in which pupils were taught about abortion by watching a gory slide show and passing around a plastic replica of an aborted foetus.
He writes: "[The nuns] bundled a girl out of the hall when she informed them that her sister had had an abortion. I half expected to see her head impaled on the school gates at hometime - come to think of it, I never did see her again ... shit!"
There was consternation yesterday in the comedy world over Dawkins's choice of target. Steve Bennett, editor of the comedy website chortle.co.uk, said: "I know he came from a Catholic school but most of the stuff in the book from that is anecdotal funny stories. There were some nuns he liked and some nuns he didn't like. Peter Kay's not an obvious person to be at the centre of this sort of controversy. His stock in trade is a cosy world of things we can all relate to, and I suppose a belief in God is part of that cosy world."
It is not the first time Dawkins's atheist militancy has encountered an unlikely opponent.
He was criticised recently for describing Nadia Eweida, the BA employee who refused to take off her cross at work, as having "one of the most stupid faces I've ever seen".
The Phoenix Nights star's memoirs, which record his childhood and rise to the threshold of stardom, were the celebrity publishing sensation of last year. The Sound of Laughter sold a record-breaking 600,000 copies in the first two months after publication and sales are now approaching 1m. It is in the running for the book of the year and biography of the year awards.
Kay's line in Phoenix Nights: "Garlic bread - it's the future, I've tasted it," was named best one-liner in television comedy in a poll last year...

Salon book review reveals error in new Michael Lewis book

The Nov. 28 book review "Pigskin Philosophy" quoted author Michael Lewis' assertion that NFL quarterbacks threw 7,583 passes in 1960. In fact, quarterbacks from two different professional football leagues, the NFL and the AFL, threw that number of passes in 1960, according to a statistician Lewis consulted. Lewis says that he has alerted his publisher to the mistake; a correction will be made in future printings of the book. The review also cited the total number of passes thrown in 1960 and 2000 as an indication of the increasing popularity of the passing game. That comparison, however, does not account for the increase in the total number of games played each season during that period. A more appropriate measure is the number of passes thrown per game. The review has been corrected. Link

Erratum note placed in book after author fooled by "scurrilous forgery"

As David Smith wrote in a recent article in The Observer, "The first question AN Wilson is likely to face at literary festivals for a while will be: 'How did you fall for it?'"
That's because Wilson is the recent victim of a hoax letter. A hoax letter that he published in his biography of poet Sir John Betjeman. A hoax letter sent to him by a fellow Betjeman biographer that spells out the following in code: "AN Wilson is a shit."
The Sunday Times was the first to spot the hoax. So how will Wilson's publisher handle the mess? Says the UK house:

"We won't be stopping publication of the book, but when we reprint it, we will take the letter out," said Emma Mitchell, a publicist for publisher Hutchinson. "We're not panicking about it"

Wilson's US publisher, the venerable Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is taking a different approach. From a story in Publisher's Weekly Daily:

...FSG's plans to bring out Betjeman: A Life in the U.S. in December were thwarted by the bogus document; when the scandal broke, the house already had brought in finished books from the U.K. to sell in the U.S., which contained the fraudulent letter as well as incorrect information regarding it. The solution, according to FSG senior v-p of marketing and publicity Jeff Seroy, was to include an erratum note from Wilson in all 10,000 copies of the book's first editions, and to correct the text (and omit Hillier's made-up document) in all future editions...
In his erratum note, Wilson comes across as a good sport, explaining how he received the letter and his hindsight view: "I should have smelt a rat when I wrote back to 'Eve de Harben,' an anagram of 'Ever been had?'" Keeping a stiff upper lip, Wilson ends with the declaration that the "scurrilous forgery will be removed in any future reprints."

Harry Potter And the Mistaken Exams

Fark spotted this story in the UK's Sun about an error discovered in the Harry Potter series:

JK ROWLING has been forced to correct a plot blunder in a Harry Potter book — after fans spotted it.
The author credits Hermione Granger with 11 top exam results in the first hardback edition of book six, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince.
But in book five — Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix — we are told she takes TEN examinations.
Publishers Bloomsbury have corrected the paperback edition to give Hermione nine “outstanding” and one “exceeds expectations” in her Ordinary Wizarding Levels.
In the uncorrected version, Harry gets seven OWLs with honours, Ron also achieves seven, while Hermione gets ten “outstandings” and one “exceeds expectations”.
One of the first fan websites to spot the error was www.mugglenet.com. It is believed to be the first blunder in the Potter series, which has earned JK, 41, more than £500million...
Bloomsbury admitted last night: “We can confirm there was an error.” A publishing source said: “With a series like this it is inevitable a blunder like this would occur. It is just remarkable it didn’t happen earlier. It was only a small error and easily reversible.”
Hermione actress Emma Watson, 17, is a real-life brainbox. She got eight A*s grades and two As in her GCSEs.

Syndicate says Coulter not a plagiarist

After The New York Post, no stranger to plagiarism itself, leveled plagiarism accusations against Ann Coulter last week, the company that syndicates her column decided to look into the issue. Editor & Publisher has a story about Universal's findings. Bottom line: it says her work is clean. Here's the statement that Universal president and editor Lee Salem sent to E&P:

Last week a software program company official ran Ann Coulter's columns through a 'match-text' program, frequently used by teachers to detect original work. The New York Post cited two columns in which some text matched other published materials and also mentioned three snippets in her book, 'Godless: The Church of Liberalism.'
In addition to looking at the columns mentioned in the New York Post story, we also reviewed a sampling of other columns that have been mentioned in the media. Like her book publisher, Crown, Universal Press Syndicate finds no merits to the allegations of plagiarism brought by the software company executive. There are only so many ways you can rewrite a fact and minimal matching text is not plagiarism.
Universal Press Syndicate is confident in the ability of Ms. Coulter, an attorney and frequent media target, to know when to make attribution and when not to. We also have confidence in our 35-year history of detecting fraudulent and unethical work, having represented conservatives and liberal commentators alike.

E&P also got comment from John Barrie, whose company did the initial report on her work. On the one had he said some of her work is "uncited, it is unoriginal, and it does look like plagiarism." Then he seems to hedge a bit: "Our technology is not designed to make those judgment calls," So it's up to her syndiacte and publisher. As of now, they stand behind her work.

NY Post calls Coulter a plagiarist

It appears that the New York Post, which doesn't think it needs to tell readers when one of its journalists plagiarizes, has followed up on allegations against Ann Coutler that were first raised by The Rude Pundit in early June. The Post reports that plagiarism detector iThenticate scanned her latest book and some of her syndicated columns and found several passages that appear to have been plagiarised. Editor & Publisher has a summary of the Post story, which carried the headline, "COPYCATTY COULTER PILFERS PROSE: PRO." Here are two Coulter columns that John Barrie, creator of iThenticate, says are suspect:

Her Aug. 3, 2005, column, 'Read My Lips: No New Liberals,' about U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, includes six passages, ranging from 10 to 48 words each, that appeared 15 years earlier in the same order in an L.A. Times article, headlined 'Liberals Leery as New Clues Surface on Souter's Views.' But nowhere in that column does she mention the L.A. Times or the story's writer, David G. Savage.

Her June 29, 2005, column, 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Religion,' incorporates 10 facts on National Endowment for the Arts-funded work that originally appeared in the same order in a 1991 Heritage Foundation report, 'The National Endowment for the Arts: Misusing Taxpayers' Money.' But again, the Heritage Foundation isn't credited.

We can't get a hold of the full Post story, but one can imagine that the cribbed book text identified by The Rude Pundit checked out when iThenticate went to work. "Just as Coulter plays free and loose with her citations in 'Godless,' she obviously does the same in her columns," Barrie told the Post. We'll add more as it becomes available. More from the story:

...John Barrie, the creator of a leading plagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least three instances of what he calls "textbook plagiarism" in the leggy blond pundit's "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book's text through the company's digital iThenticate program.
He also says he discovered verbatim lifts in Coulter's weekly column, which is syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, including the Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel and Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.
Barrie, CEO of iParadigms, told The Post that one 25-word passage from the "Godless" chapter titled "The Holiest Sacrament: Abortion" appears to have been lifted nearly word for word from Planned Parenthood literature published at least 18 months before Coulter's 281-page book was released.
A separate, 24-word string from the chapter "The Creation Myth" appeared about a year earlier in the San Francisco Chronicle with just one word change - "stacked" was changed to "piled."
Another 33-word passage that appears five pages into "Godless" allegedly comes from a 1999 article in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald...

"The Medium Is the Massage"

This Post has been updated/corrected.

Just how far did American Apparel's Dov Charney worm his way inside NYT Mag writer Jaime Wolf's head during their time together?
We ask because there is a rather Freudian typo in Wolf's lengthy feature on the schmatte/sexual liberation/anti-sweatshop entrepreneur. The story's lead paragraph mentions two books found in Charney's office. One is "The Concise 48 Laws of Power" and the other, according to the Times Mag piece, is "The Medium Is the Massage." Freud and McLuhan, together at last. The error title has been fixed changed in the online version of the article, though no correction has been added to the story. We wonder: was it Wolf's goof, or did an editor give McLuhan's book the happy ending? The error rubbed us the wrong way, and the lingering question tugs at us. Only a correction could finish us off. (Apologies.)
UPDATE: A few readers and Jamie Wolf have correctly pointed out that the book by McLuhan was indeed titled "The Medium Is The Massage." Just check Amazon, for example. So: this is not a typo. Though someone on the Times website seems to think it is; or perhaps the Times online style book calls for the more accepted title?  Rather, this is a continuation of a typo. The "massage" title was itself a mistake. Below is a response that McLuhan's son sent to a person who inquired about the title:

“Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title should have read "The Medium is the Message" but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age"."

So, apologies to Wolf for taking this too far. And thanks to everyone who showed us the error of our ways. We'll of course note this in our corrections post this Friday.
An scan of the page is below. Click for larger view.

Pass that error along

The Books of The Times review on Nov. 14, about "Elia Kazan," a biography by Richard Schickel, misspelled the surname of Kazan's first wife, following the misspelling in the book. (A review in the Book Review on Nov. 27 repeated the error.) She was Molly Day Thacher, not Thatcher. Link

AP celebrates "Lolita"...

By not reading it.

In a Sept. 22 story for the 50th anniversary of the publication of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," The Associated Press erroneously quoted the novel's opening. The excerpt is "My sin, my soul" not "My sin. My soul."

Mnookin book to add corrections section

In a rare decision, the paperback edition of Seth Mnookin's book about the New York Times and Jayson Blair, "Hard News," will include a three page corrections section. Editor & Publisher has the details:

Mnookin says he only made a few errors but, to continue his commitment to “transparency,” he is “offering up a relative rarity in the world of book publishing: a corrections section.”

Most of the corrections (like the Times') are of a minor scale, such as the executive dining room of the paper being located on the 11th, not 14th floor, and Clyde Haberman stringing from City College of New York, not Columbia University.

The more substantial correction concerns the original's assertion that two Timesmen, Jon Landman and Jim Roberts, had a testy relationship. Mnookin notes that this was based on a New York magazine story and that Landman tells him that though the two editors are not “drinking buddies,” they do share mutual respect. 

The errors mentioned above were of course easily preventable by making a few phone calls, but Mnookin's willingness to add a corrections section is commendable.