What is the relationship between truth and accuracy? The Lifespan of a Fact reviewed

At the time, I’m sure it all seemed absolutely hilarious. It was in 2012 that W.W. Norton first published The Lifespan of a Fact, co-written by the essayist John D’Agata and his one-time fact-checker Jim Fingal. The book consists of an essay by D’Agata, ‘What Happens There’ — which tells the story of the death of a 16-year-old, Levi Presley, who killed himself by jumping from the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas — plus Fingal’s meticulous marginal notes and comments. (The essay was apparently written for Harper’s magazine in 2003, which rejected it because of factual inaccuracies: it was eventually published in the magazine The Believer, fact-checked by Fingal, in 2010.)

The book was a serious experiment in postmodern playfulness, a Socratic dialogue irl — there really was, it seems, a Levi Presley, who killed himself by suicide — and last year it became a Broadway play, starring Daniel Radcliffe, who interned at the New Yorker in order to get a feel for the whole fact-checking thing.