Photo: limonada via FlickrFirst things first: Don’t ask me how I went from being an editor of Grist to an expert in wrongness. It’s a long story. Suffice it to say that in 2006, I left Grist (with much regret) in order to write a book about being wrong. (That’s the eponymous Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, published earlier this month by Ecco/HarperCollins).
At first blush, these two jobs don’t seem to have much in common. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering about the overlap between my identity as an environmentalist and my identity as a wrongologist. Here’s why: For the past few months, I’ve been conducting a series of Q&As over at Slate — interviews with various interesting, well-known people about their relationship to being wrong. Not long after the series started, I got an email from a reader:
You should do an interview about wrong environmental predictions. “Too cheap to meter” — nuclear power — would be a good one. I’m not volunteering!
I was immediately inclined to agree with my correspondent: I sh... Read more