Stephen Dubner

Both Lev and I don't take ourselves too seriously.

We reported and researched and fact-checked and dotted every I.I.,

So I wasn't concerned about that.

We did have one thing shortly after publication that we found out had been wrong, which was a kind of terrible thing.

This guy that we wrote about as having heroically gone undercover in the Ku Klux Klan and exposed them.

And he did do a lot of that type of work, but he kind of conflated his own identity with that of another guy who did the undercover stuff.

And he wrote books about it.

We interviewed him.

He'd been in all these histories of civil rights movement and Klan.

It turned out that he had exaggerated.

So I'd never heard or read a word about any claims like this.

But when we published our book for Economics 2005, someone wrote to us who had been a collaborator of that guy much later, working on a book together.

And this guy had had access to a set of very robust and valuable archives that were essentially private archives.

They weren't on the public record.

So I went into those archives, looked at everything, found out that this guy who was saying that our main character had exaggerated was probably very accurate.

I went to our subject.

This guy's name was Stetson Kennedy.

He's gone now, but he was quite old then.

And I said, I need to talk to you about something kind of important.

He was in Florida.