New York Times obituary writer Margalit Fox on the art and science of writing what she calls “flash biographies.”

Methods

Episode 10: Dead and Pre-Dead

Methods is about how we know what we know. Each week, Brooke Borel, author of The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, interviews someone who examines facts for a living, including journalists, scientists, historians, judges, translators, and more. Picking one of the guest’s projects—an investigative article, a book, a scientific discovery—we’ll dig into how they did it. What was their process? How did they investigate the evidence? What stories, pitfalls, and dead ends didn’t make it into the published work? How sure are they? And what level of uncertainty should we all be comfortable with when it comes to calling something a fact?

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Methods