Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was journalist Kathryn Schulz, author of the new book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
Schulz has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and the Huffington Post. She shared tips for other journalists looking to pitch a book based around an abstract idea.
In addition, we discussed Errotica, the section of her site where readers share their own stories. An excerpt: “One of the things I’ve learned, much to my delight, is that people do want to share their stories. I was somewhat surprised by that, on the whole, most of us don’t spend that much time thinking about being wrong–unless we absolutely have to, in the moment we are wrong about something.”
Schulz concluded: “It’s been really a pleasure to go out on the road [and] give people a chance to talk about wrongness (in the abstract, not when they are in the middle that crisis of being wrong themselves) to look back and really think about how they deal with error, how their family members, co-workers, and country deal with error. People are actually very hungry for that conversation. Because they see firsthand, we all see firsthand that our default way of dealing with it can have some fairly corrosive effects.”