Web Transcription Perils

I learned from the wallace-l list, which I recently rejoined, that the D. T. Max article I mentioned earlier misquoted Larry McCaffrey’s interview with Wallace from the Review of Contemporary Fiction. The transcribed web version has Wallace reporting that “most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive” instead of “mediated.” The print version is available as a scanned pdf in EBSCO.

I last made this joke when a Malcolm Gladwell article identified Linus Torvalds as Norwegian, but it sounds like this one landed on the Bright Lights, Big City fact-checker’s desk. I did not notice the error when I read the article myself, I should note.