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jacobgeller.com
this article rocks
How do you confirm a fact? You ask, over and over, “How do we know?” Years ago, John McPhee wrote about a Japanese incendiary balloon that, during the Second World War, floated across the Pacific and struck an electrical cable serving a top-secret nuclear site; a reactor that enriched plutonium for the atomic bomb bound for Nagasaki was temporarily disabled. How did McPhee know? Someone had told him. How did that person know? He’d heard about it—secondhand. The checker, Sara Lippincott, spent weeks trying to track down an original source. Just before the magazine went to the printer, she got a lead. She called the source at home, in Florida. He was at the mall. How to locate him in time? She called the police. They found him and put him in a phone booth. Did he know about the incident? He did. How? He was the reactor’s site manager; he saw it happen. The detail made it in.
September 5, 2025 at 2:36 PM