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Washington Post
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
The New York Post judges The Fact Checker
The New York Post editorial board blasted The Fact Checker last week, calling us a 'propaganda mill' and suggesting it was time to 'close up shop.' They name-checked three articles, but with sparse details that might have left readers scratching their heads. Everyone makes mistakes — which we quickly try to correct. (And when we write negatively about Democrats, the New York Post often eagerly reports on those fact checks.) But the sharp tone of the editorial inspired us to look back and assess the columns.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Checking Facts in a Post-Truth World
by Austin KelleyAtlantic Monthly Press, 256 pp., $27 IN THE 1950S, TO CAPTURE WHAT IT WAS LIKE to have his stories sunk by a fact-checker, a Time magazine writer came up with a song. 'I don't think we can say this / I don't like how we play this / I'm not sure that's the way this was,' it went, with the words sung to the tune of 'You're Just in Love,' by Irving Berlin. (Berlin's daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, was coincidentally a fact-checker for the magazine.) Ultimately, the song's 'arrogant' writer, who claims his 'facts are set in vivid hue,' gets put in his place by a dismissive researcher, who delivers the final lyric: 'They're not lies, they're just not true.' Artist Elizabeth Moran unearthed the parody tune in the Time archives while researching the magazine's fact-checking department. She also discovered that from the magazine's founding in the 1920s until the 1970s, all its fact checkers were women. Time editor Edward Kennedy cheekily warned them: 'the most important point to remember in checking is that the writer is your natural enemy. He is trying to see how much he can get away with. Remember that when people write letters about mistakes, it is you who will be screeched at. So protect yourself.' Fact-checkers have since entered popular culture as arbiters of truth. In Seinfeld, Elaine Benes dates Jack, 'a fact-checker for New York magazine.' She adds: 'It's not much, but it has a certain type of quiet dignity.' Jay McInerney worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker for ten months before he was fired. He 'wasn't very good at it,' and 'left ingloriously with my tail between my legs'—only to go on and satirize the job in his 1985 novel Bright Lights, Big City. At one point, the novel's second-person narrator offers a warning that echoes Kennedy's: 'If an error slips into the magazine, it is one of you, and not the writer, who will be crucified.' Now, forty years after Bright Lights, we have Austin Kelley's The Fact Checker, a novel that dramatizes the life of another unnamed practitioner of the titular profession. While both books mock the minutiae of the job, Kelley's novel is less in the lineage of McInerney and more in the tradition of another facts-obsessed writer from New York: Thomas Pynchon. Get 30 day free trial 'AS A CHECKER, YOU DON'T CHOOSE what you check. You check everything. That's the calling.' Kelley's narrator-protagonist thinks of his job as a vocation. The novel's first line warns us that his career is short-lived: 'It may seem odd, if not idiotic, that the story that took up so much of my time and energy, the story that was ultimately the end for me, was about food, not terrorism.' Kelley, like McInerney, once checked facts for the New Yorker, although he doesn't seem to harbor as much of a grudge as his predecessor does against their former department. In this novel, the fact-checking department is an ascetic cadre: 'We were quiet. We were careful.' Although he had often to 'badger people about details, sometimes irrelevant details,' he 'knew from experience that some details, irrelevant in themselves, become more significant when they pile up.' Such work is only possible when one believes in capital-T Truth. The novel's fact-checker is a former history graduate student whose work on nineteenth-century utopian communities ultimately felt slight. 'Even in academia,' he admits, 'most people wanted sound bites and oversimplifications.' Yet now, 'as a fact-checker . . . my job was to prevent oversimplifications, to prevent distortions, to prevent lies.' Fact-checking has lately come to signify catching misinformation and disinformation from politicians, specifically (and from one, in particular). While the noble goal of honoring the truth remains, this mode of fact-checking, especially when it is done in real time, naturally shades into lie-catching, which will always feel haughty and ideologically motivated to some. But in the magazine world, fact-checking remains a slower, more careful art. As a writer, I've been fact-checked by Rolling Stone and the Atlantic, but also by publications well outside the legacy enterprise (including The Bulwark). It is comforting, truly, for someone to verify that I am telling the truth. Sign up to get our fully fact-checked independent political and cultural journalism delivered to your inbox. Yet the narrator of The Fact Checker knows his project is tenuous. 'I'm always drowning in a storm of information and doubt,' he laments, and his situation only gets worse after he is assigned a story on a farmer's market. The market specializes in 'trendy tomatoes,' and the whole affair seems rather tame save for an errant source: a vendor who claimed there was 'nefarious business' going on at the market. 'People sell everything here,' she said. 'It ain't all green.' The fact-checker goes to the market 'on a reconnaissance mission.' Fieldwork isn't necessarily beyond his responsibilities, but he admits that his visit was premature. 'I had not yet prepared my full list of questions. I didn't know exactly what I needed to know.' The reason soon becomes clear. The fact-checker is lonely. His ex, Magda, was often dismissive of him. He'd been single ever since their breakup: 'I was stuck in my head.' Enter Sylvia. She's quirky and chatty. She even asks if he likes fact-checking, which makes him feel special. He wants to ask Sylvia more questions, but she doesn't have a cell phone. She asks if he can stop by Friday at closing: 'We can go somewhere else to talk,' she says. And then she hands him a bag of tomatoes, suggestively: 'It seemed intimate, almost flirtatious.' Soon enough, the fact-checker is at a nightmarish supper club party with Sylvia's friends, who 'wheel a table into the middle of the room' bearing the severed head of a pig named Siddhartha; it arrives looking 'wet and oily, almost like melting wax.' Sylvia spends the night at the fact-checker's place. All seems to be going well—or, well, you know. Well enough. Share BUT WHEN MORNING COMES, THE FACT-CHECKER wakes to a coy note from Sylvia that ends with a mysterious postscript: 'Yes! Let's do it.' She's gone, and he's confused. He thinks about all their conversations and tries to parse them for leads and information about the story, but also to understand the meaning of her exclamatory note. A day becomes a week. Still nothing from Sylvia. He returns to the market, and she's gone. Nobody has any leads. Facts are his life, and since the facts aren't adding up, his life is starting to become very confusing. He needs to repurpose his professional tools for a more urgent task than he is accustomed to taking on. Here, at the halfway mark of the novel, The Fact Checker reveals its true form: This is a philosophical detective story. And its clearest and best predecessor is Thomas Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1966. Like Kelley's novel, Pynchon's book arrived during a tumultuous time in America, one where intense polarization had damaged the nation's fundamental sense of the truth. In The Crying of Lot 49, a woman named Oedipa Maas discovers that she has inexplicably been made 'executor, or she supposed executrix' of the estate of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, an eccentric real-estate mogul. She travels to Inverarity's home to meet with her co-executor and start looking into her ex's records. It is Sunday, with little else happening. She parks her car on a hill and looks down. 'The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity' as 'the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit.' Smog chokes the horizon, but sun pushes through, and Oedipa feels 'at the center of an odd, religious instant.' Oedipa wants to believe there is order in the world, that there is a reason why she has been chosen for this task—as Kelley's fact-checker clings to his belief in the simple existence of the truth, a clutched talisman of reason. Yet in scene after comic scene, Pynchon throws boffo complications into Oedipa's search. Oedipa is undaunted. 'I want to see if there's a connection,' she says. Through sheer force (or farce) of will, she seeks patterns. But she begins to doubt herself, and fears that she truly is the victim of an experiment—or worse, a conspiracy. Oedipa's steadfast belief in the power of truth—of an order behind the disorder—again connects her to the central character of The Fact Checker. Kelley's narrator knows the world is strange; he's made a career of verifying its oddities, praising its many-splendored reality and rebuking writers for the shortcomings of their offerings to it. Fact-checkers are the priests of the empirical. In Lot 49, Oedipa finally crashes headlong into the conspiracy. Old fillings in her teeth start to hurt. She stares upward at the night sky. 'There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains.' Although her body seems to be succumbing to paranoia, Pynchon offers just enough clues to keep her going—to keep us going—until we are forced to accept that either Oedipa has lost her mind or her increasingly elaborate fantasy is real. For all of the novel's silliness, Pynchon's stance is clear: there is a greater meaning in the madness, in the cacophony of our world, as long as we are brave and clever enough to find its patterns. Reading The Crying of Lot 49, we get the sense that Pynchon believes in some order, some God behind the curtain.1 But things have happened in the intervening decades that put Kelley's book at a far remove from Pynchon's. (Some of the steps along the historical way are evident in the subject matter of other stories the fact-checker has worked on; the titles of the parts of the book draw from a famous Bush-era locution.) When we try to steal a glimpse behind the curtain in 2025, many of us—like Kelley's narrator—see nothing there. Share The Bulwark THE FACT CHECKER FOLLOWS SOMEWHAT more pedestrian narrative paths than Pynchon's book does, although the aforementioned pig's head and an odd scene with a sheep in a bathroom get close to evoking the latter's surrealism. But the two books share an absurd sensibility, from odd characters to deliberately cringeworthy quips. (The local coffee shop in The Fact Checker, for instance, is called Grounds Zero.) Most importantly, both novels depict characters riding their obsessions into a sort of personal oblivion. In Kelley's novel, save for a little conversation and even littler intimacy, the narrator doesn't really know Sylvia. He's not quite in love with her, exactly, but rather the idea of her. Or it might be that he loves the idea of her in the context of a conspiracy he has uncovered and now must heroically expose. The climax of The Fact Checker is underwhelming, but arguably, it must be. With all its top-line absurdity, The Crying of Lot 49 would feel almost mimetic now: Imagine explaining the key players and major events of American politics in 2025 to yourself near the end of the Obama administration. 'Pynchonian' has become a ready-to-hand descriptor for contemporary chaos, but Pynchon's formative strangeness, the kind he showed in his early novels like The Crying of Lot 49, landed like a bomb in a cultural landscape defined by a fraught sense of tradition and convention, where challenges were being brought from every corner against strong positions. The culture of his time still believed in truth, however much that notion had already been damaged. His novel played with and upon something that was still there. In contrast, Kelley's novel arrives in a world wherein imagining American culture as characterized by a foundational acceptance of verifiable facts feels either anachronistic or terribly naïve. Kelley's protagonist doesn't save the day; he doesn't even understand it. This makes The Fact Checker a book that is intensely aware of its time. Perhaps we need more subtle comedies like this to help us comprehend what has happened to the truth. Share this review with a fellow member of your (future) book club. Share 1 Raised Catholic in Glen Cove, Long Island, Pynchon regularly went to Mass and confession while a student at Cornell, and in his first novel, V, a Jesuit preaches to rats in the subway.
Los Angeles Times
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
When the fact-checker in question is not exactly a reliable narrator
The cover of Austin Kelley's debut novel, 'The Fact Checker,' will be immediately recognizable to a certain type of person: Ah, the New Yorker, they might think, before blinking and realizing that it isn't. I am that kind of person; the famous weekly has been around my whole life, issues piled on the bathroom counter or lying open on the kitchen table, and I eventually read them as well. At some point, I learned about its famous fact-checkers, the people who toil away in relative obscurity (the magazine doesn't list them anywhere, though you may find some by trawling LinkedIn) in order to make sure that every factual statement the magazine publishes is correct — even if those facts appear within poetry. 'The Fact Checker' is narrated by a man holding the titular title who is, essentially, a flâneur: a literary type who wanders around his urban environment, observing and commenting on society from a somewhat detached position. While the magazine he works for remains unnamed, it's clearly meant to be the New Yorker; but readers hoping for juicy insider gossip will be disappointed (actual insiders — those who were around in the mid-aughts, anyway — may recognize the types and tempers Kelley's narrator interacts with at work). The title, the cover, the font — they're all rather effective bait. Fact-checking does feature in the novel, of course. The main plot, which takes place in July and August 2004, kicks off when the narrator is given an article to check about the Union Square Greenmarket — referred to as Mandeville/Green for its author and subject, respectively. It's a simple enough piece, and the fact-checker deals with much of it in short order. But one quote, about 'nefarious business' going on at the market, makes him pause, and he goes in search of the source, Sylvia, in order to confirm what she told the author and ask for details. Sylvia is a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Mandeville says she's 'interesting,' which the narrator recognizes might be a euphemism for her being insane and/or sexy. She has a distinctive feature (a scar) that seems to heighten her beauty to the narrator's eyes, and is passionate about things, including the tomatoes she grows. She takes the narrator on a journey, first to a cemetery and then to a secret supper club run out of a squatted-in office in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan; she grew up on a commune and claims it was a cult, really, but she likes the idea of cults: 'If you are in a cult, you are really committed, worshiping the Deity. Worshiping the good. That's all I want to do in this life. Worship the good.' After sleeping with the narrator, she leaves him a note promising to call and promptly disappears. He spends the rest of the novel trying to track her down. Much like critic Nathan Rabin's definition of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl type who exists 'in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors,' Sylvia is there 'to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.' The Fact Checker, who isn't entirely over an ex-girlfriend who cheated on him with her dissertation advisor — another familiar type — is one such young man. As he tries to find her, he ends up in a series of interesting places (an anarchist meeting in a boat, for example, or the Irish Hunger Memorial), talking to interesting people (Sylvia's friends and co-workers, mainly, but also an apparently lonely and chatty Tony Curtis), and having interesting thoughts, many of which are concerned with factoids he obviously learned while doing his job (Audrey Munson, the 'American Venus'; the transition to new street signs in New York). The Fact Checker is an unreliable narrator not only because he's telling his story from a remove of at least seven years (he mentions Lyft in the last chapter, which was founded in 2012), but also because whenever he's not in the office, he's unceremoniously yet steadily drinking, often to the point of blackout. This seems to be more of a problem than he's admitting, and it's not the only self-deception he practices. He wants to be a good guy: he's always nervous he's going to be perceived as creepy by the women he encounters, he questions his assumptions about people he sees, and he's uncomfortable with the sexism he witnesses among male friends and acquaintances. But he also never interjects when privy to such 'guy talk' and he downplays how much his own obsession with finding Sylvia is linked to his fantasy of her, as well as how her disappearance reminds him of his ex's own behavioral patterns. The Fact Checker is an engaging figure not for his own sake — a friend of Sylvia's, Agnes, tells him at one point that he's 'a blank man' and she's not wrong — but for the inconsistencies in his behaviors, and the dramatic irony inherent in the mismatch between his own narration and what we, as well as those around him, begin to see in him. 'I remember that day well,' the Fact Checker tells us on the book's first page, but by the end of his first encounter with Sylvia, when she hands him a bag of tomatoes, he thinks, 'It seemed intimate, almost flirtatious. Or maybe I'm misremembering the whole thing.' While 'The Fact Checker' is uneven, it's a fun and quick read, and it does raise some of the most relevant questions du jour: What is a fact? What is truth? And who gets to decide? Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel 'All My Mother's Lovers' and the forthcoming novel 'Beings.'
New York Times
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He Can Get the Details Right, Except in His Own Messy Life
Hollywood aspirants had the William Morris mailroom. Junior literati long vied to join The New Yorker's fact-checking department (or, for the gals, the typing pool). They hoped to breathe the magic vapors of E.B. White while cooking up the Great American Novel. In the age of 'truthiness' and 'fake news,' and with ChatGPT hovering like a mockingbird, the role of fact checker has been newly narrowed and consecrated. Or so suggests 'The Fact Checker,' the first novel by Austin Kelley, a former New Yorker fact checker. It's a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity. We've come a long way from 'Bright Lights, Big City,' which jump-started the career of Jay McInerney, another former New Yorker fact checker, in 1984 … or have we? Both books have unnamed young male protagonists. Both lampoon entrenched procedures and starchy characters at the New Yorkerish magazines where they toil: In 'The Fact Checker,' which is set in 2004, there's a veteran checker named Mr. Lancaster, 'a frail old ghost of a man' who stocks the house library with multiple volumes on Civil War artillery and is comically conscripted to check a piece on the rapper 50 Cent. Both narrators bop around downtown and go on benders, though the preferred poison of Kelley's is whiskey, not Bolivian marching powder. Both pine for their exes; then, a fashion model named Amanda; now, a graduate student, Magdalena. Our 21st-century fact checker used to be a graduate student, too, specializing in 19th-century utopianism, until he realized 'no one really wanted to read academic history.' He worships the Fonz and looks like Tony Shalhoub, the actor. He loves watching baseball and hates playing. 'There was that painful slow time when the ball arced through the air. It was excruciating. Was I under it? Yes. No. Yes. No. Too late.' Since Magda ran off with a professor, he has struggled with romance in New York, where — and this was before the apps — dates and meetings are oft confused and 'everyone was tentative and ambiguous.' He is, he comes to realize with some consternation, 'a meat eater who's never killed anything.' One of the things he's compulsive about checking is the fly of his pants. Kelley's hero doesn't long to escape his duties, as McInerney's dissolute alter ego did, but takes pride in his variegated beta role. He's been assigned to check a story about the Union Square Greenmarket, by a debonair but careless restaurant critic named John Mandeville, one of whose sources is a farmer, Sylvia. Mandeville neglected to get her surname, and so the checker — encouraged by the promise that she's 'interesting' — goes to interview her. Who is Sylvia? Cryptic, lanky and scarred, she feeds him a life-changing heirloom tomato. She herself is something of a hot tomato. One of the novel's charms is uncovering the vulnerable ornaments — wacky statues, call girls on 11th Avenue, subterranean oyster restaurants — of an increasingly 'Big Box Manhattan.' Sylvia and the 'blank man,' as a friend of hers calls him, visit a graveyard in the financial district on an ambiguous date, then an illegal farm-to-table supper club called Heads and Tails, consuming tongue, offal pie and pork served five ways. They hook up. And then, lacking a cellphone, as some did then — 'trying to maintain some freedom' — she disappears. Is there something more, something sinister, to Mandeville's story? To Mandeville himself? Especially in one chapter so gruesome I had to read it through reluctantly parted fingers, 'The Fact Checker' argues for a heightened sensitivity to the brutality of the food chain. (In this it reminded me of 'The Vegan,' Andrew Lipstein's 2023 novel about a financier who starts hearing the animals.) But it's also about the looming gig economy, the division of labor in the field of writing as well as potatoes. Not for nothing do we now refer to 'content farms.' Planning a story about the Swift Boat smear campaign, the magazine's staffers can't quite see yet that they're in a changing ecosystem, where supply is soon to outpace demand and alternative facts are hopping onto the conveyor belt of public record. In one Don Draper moment, Kelley's fact checker considers 'how strange it is to stand inside a giant building held up so high in the air, with other people standing inside a giant building on other floors, each in their own world, and how hard it is, at any minute, to know exactly where you are and what caused you to be there, and what you should do next.' He's researching the collapse of the twin towers, which were so boldly featured on the original cover of 'Bright Lights, Big City.'
