John Clayton's Blog

The New Yorker magazine is known for the scrupulousness of its fact-checking. In the novel Bright Lights Big City, the hero’s incompetence at his fact-checking job is hilarious in part because his job tasks are so trivial as to be opaque to most readers. Calvin Trillin likes to tell stories about the way they even fact-check his jokes. New Yorker fact-checkers are so renowned that any hint of a grammatical error or alleged misquote generates a good deal of media noise.

So I was surprised to read the following in this week’s humorous essay by Ian Frazier, in which he pretends to be a rich person who has bought, and is remodeling, something even bigger than his contemporaries -- Wyoming:

Spare us the headaches, please! We’ve had plenty already, with the former occupants (thank heavens they’re gone) and all the junk they left behind—the old broken-down pickup trucks, houses, eyesore water towers, uranium mines, the University of Wyoming, Yellowtail Dam, Casper.

Problem: Yellowtail Dam is not in Wyoming.

Not a big deal: it’s a funny joke, and the phrase “Yellowtail Dam” enhances it in a way that “Buffalo Bill Dam” would not. Furthermore, Yellowtail Dam is very close to the Wyoming border. But as my articles have discussed, it is located in Montana. So when it comes to the media-favorite game of catching those league-leading New Yorker fact checkers with their pants down, there’s a certain pleasure for me in being the first to publicly catch them.

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