mistakes
DC Firefighters Stood By as an Old Man Died
Hamilton Nolan · 01/30/14 11:51AMMan Mistakenly Busted in Drug Raid After Giving Homeless Man $0.75
Taylor Berman · 01/17/14 04:55PMAl Qaeda-Linked Militants Apologize for Cutting Off Wrong Guy's Head
Max Read · 11/14/13 02:31PMWhoops, They Didn't Need to Build the World's Biggest Boat After All
Hamilton Nolan · 09/26/13 08:40AMJ.K. Trotter · 09/25/13 12:31PM
Is Anal the Way to Go?
John Cook · 09/17/13 04:03PM"Let's Celebrate" After Last Weekend's Overdose Deaths, Says Flavorpill
Hamilton Nolan · 09/05/13 02:57PMHusband Accidentally Sells Wife's $23,000 Wedding Ring for $10
Taylor Berman · 06/12/13 07:31PMBefore Racquel Cloutier went to the hospital to deliver her fifth child, she hid her $23,000 diamond wedding ring in a plain watch box to keep it safe from her two-year-old twins. As she was in the hospital recovering, her husband, Eric Cloutier, decided to hold a yard sale in part to keep the couple's other children occupied. Only one problem: he accidentally put the watch box, containing the $23,000 ring inside, for sale – for $10 – and someone bought it.
'Surprising' New Facts About Roger Ailes Were Published Two Years Ago
Hamilton Nolan · 06/05/13 04:33PMBloomberg View columnist and longtime Newsweek man Jonathan Alter has a new book coming out that includes details about jowly shithead Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Politico's media reporter Dylan Byers writes that excerpts from the book show that Alter "reveals a number of surprising facts about the Fox News chief that, taken together, make him out to appear extraordinarily paranoid." Yes, Roger Ailes is paranoid. But Alter didn't "reveal" anything new at all.
A Sloppy Excel Error Might Have Messed Up the Way We Think About GDP
Maggie Lange · 04/16/13 01:46PMA new study reveals that one of the most cited economic principles regarding GDP and debt is most likely based on a "sloppy Excel coding error." According to a 2009 book by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time It's Different, countries with a high debt to GDP ratio have slow economic growth. But three economists at the University of Massachusetts have published a critique of Reinhart and Rogoff entitled: "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth?" They found a major and embarrassing error in the original calculations.
Whoops, Turns Out the Navy's $37 Billion Boat Is a Death Trap
Hamilton Nolan · 03/28/13 03:21PMAfter 9/11, the US Navy launched a massive program to build a "Littoral Combat Ship" that could fight submarines, clear underwater mines, and perform other tasks close to shore, because, um... you never know where the terrorists might be, with snorkels. Astoundingly, it appears more and more like this boondoggle has become—you guessed it—a boondoggle.
Canada Proudly Prints Wrong Maple Leaf on Its Currency Because Canada Can't Do Anything Right
Caity Weaver · 01/24/13 06:01PMAll the Mistakes Four Ohio College Kids Made Trying to Set Up Their Campus Ecstasy Lab
Hamilton Nolan · 11/27/12 10:19AMFour Ohio college students were indicted earlier this month on a multitude of drug charges, after they were caught last May trying to steal chemicals from a school chemistry lab in order to cook up some ecstasy in "an empty dorm room." An all too typical tale. For purposes of instruction—and to ensure that future college ecstasy labs are more professionally run—allow us to examine what mistakes they made in their budding criminal enterprise, all detailed exhaustively in this Plain-Dealer story:
PR Dummies: How Not to Pitch
Hamilton Nolan · 10/05/12 05:00PMPR Dummies: No, Oprah Is Not Coming
Hamilton Nolan · 08/24/12 02:40PMCharles Dickens to Be Very Embarrassed When Everyone Reads all the Stuff He Crossed Out
Caity Weaver · 08/08/12 05:40PMImagine if 100 years after you died, people started analyzing every text you'd ever sent, uncovering deleted punctuation and word choices and debating among themselves why you messaged that guy you were merely "looking forward to the party," when earlier drafts revealed you were, in fact, "so excited to see [him]!!"
PR Dummies: When Bizarro Mistakes Happen
Hamilton Nolan · 04/06/12 12:30PMWe Don't Need No Stinking Seal of Approval from the Blog Police
Hamilton Nolan · 03/12/12 10:00AMDavid Carr's column today is partly about a plan masterminded by Ad Age columnist Simon Dumenco to create, quote, a "Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation," which will ostensibly serve as a sort of trade group or (nonbinding) credentialing organization for best practices in the blogosphere. Well-intended, and a bad idea.
CVS Accidentally Gave Kids Breast Cancer Drugs
Louis Peitzman · 03/04/12 02:44PM
Kids in as many as 50 families in Chatham, New Jersey were mistakenly given breast cancer medication instead of chewable fluoride tablets. While the fluoride the children were supposed to receive is used to prevent tooth decay, the pill Tamoxifen blocks the production of estrogen. CVS has alerted all the families and apologized, but no one can figure out exactly how this happened.