journal features

the day my lies caught up with me

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2014.10.05

"I'm glad I didn't trust you," my wife said as I walked through the door. At issue: how far from home I'd led the kids on an energy-burning outing. I'd told her we were about a kilometer away, in reality we'd only managed to get a few doors away. She was trying to time the meal, I'd been trying to sound like I'd made an effort to get the kids to actually expend some energy.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton