The New Yorker's Fact Checking Policy

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The New Yorker has a pretty stringent fact-checking policy yeah and you have details in that story like that probably allegedly Xi's half-sister committed suicide as a result of similar persecution to the persecution that he faced. There are moments when you reach kind of the outer limits of the epistemological meaning of fact checking how do you go back and figure out how somebody died in the late 60s early 70s whose life has been systematically erased from the public record? The answer is that we had very very good sources on that particular detail, says John Sutter. "I'm constantly sort of thinking all the time as I'm reporting like do I even put this into my draft because will

Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury.

“I'm always trying to get inside a subculture. That's the thing that I think has been the most enduring, attractive element for me. Is there a world that has its own manners and vocabulary and internal rhythms and status structure? And who looks down on whom? And why? And who venerates whom? Who's a big deal in these worlds? And if I can get into that, it doesn't even really matter to me that much what the subculture is. I'm fascinated by trying to map that thing out.”

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