Fergus McIntosh

1 month ago | nybooks.com | Merve Emre |Fergus McIntosh

Fergus McIntosh is head of the fact-checking department at The New Yorker. He is also the first fact-checker I ever worked with at the magazine, for an essay about Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Working with McIntosh and the members of his team over the last five years has taught me how attentive, precise, and probing fact-checkers can be. Their department has also taught me what, exactly, a fact is.

1 month ago | insidestory.org.au | Fergus McIntosh

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don’t do what I want them to. — “Crosseyed and Painless,” Talking Heads Every tribe has its myths, and journalists are no exception. In America, one common story goes like this. Once, in the prelapsarian era before social media — or, perhaps, before smartphones, or Ronald Reagan — there was a time when journalists were trusted.

Jan 10, 2025 | newyorker.com | Fergus McIntosh

Every tribe has its myths, and journalists are no exception. In America, one common story goes like this: once, in the prelapsarian era before social media—or before smartphones, or the Internet—there was a time when journalists were trusted. Back then, everybody read muscular daily newspapers and watched straight-down-the-line TV reporting.

Jan 7, 2025 | newyorker.com | Fergus McIntosh

In today’s newsletter, new research on the dangers of ultra-processed food. But, first, the head of the magazine’s fact-checking department on Meta’s decision to stop checking facts. Plus:Georgia reflects on Jimmy Carter at restWhy Justin Trudeau had to step downThe view from the limo driverFergus McIntoshHead research editorThe news this morning that Meta has decided to phase out the fact-checking program it set up in 2016 made me think, incongruously, of the late, great critic Joan Acocella.

Sep 15, 2024 | newyorker.com | Fergus McIntosh

Number of Latin speakers in the Roman Empire: multitudo. Number of native Latin speakers in the world today: nil. Number of Latin speakers in the back yard of a Chelsea bar one recent sticky evening: unus. Donatien Grau, an adviser on contemporary programming at the Louvre, was in town from Paris to do a reading from his book “De Civitate Angelorum,” a treatise on Los Angeles written entirely in Latin.