• Fergus McIntosh: “One Wonders”

    In Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics

    Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?

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    From the episode:

    Merve Emre: Fergus McIntosh is head of the fact-checking department at The New Yorker. He is also the first fact-checker I ever worked with at the magazine, for an essay about Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Working with McIntosh and the members of his team over the last five years has taught me how attentive, precise, and probing fact-checkers can be. Their department has also taught me what, exactly, a fact is. Or rather, they have taught me how to think about facticity with the necessary rigor, and how that applies to every aspect of a magazine: the articles, the reviews, the fiction, the poetry, and even the cover art. As McIntosh and I discuss in our conversation, the fact-checker functions as a different kind of editor—one who regularly saves the writer from her own faulty memory, her imprecise paraphrases, and her over-hasty interpretations.

    For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.

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    Fergus McIntosh is the head research editor at The New Yorker and runs the magazine’s fact-checking department.

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    The Critic and Her Publics
    Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
    Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

    The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.

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    The Critic and Her Publics
    The Critic and Her Publics
    The best and most prominent critics working today perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work as they perform how to think about art and culture. From the New York Review of Books and Literary Hub, The Critic and Her Publics is a limited series hosted by Merve Emre.





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