An exchange of letters in the January 2016 issue of Harper's reminds me that back in the 1990s, when Stephen Glass was notoriously making stuff up for The New Republic, he also made stuff up in other publications as well. An article of his ran in the Harper's for February 1998, titled "Prophets and Losses." It concerned telephone psychics, portraying a business in which phony psychics try to keep callers on the line as long as possible in order to sock them with astronomical charges. As was often the case with Glass' frauds, it is easy to believe the broad outlines of what he was saying, which is precisely why people weren't necessarily vigilant about the details, which he invented. In the latest issue, Glass provides a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of what he fabricated for that story, a breakdown that will be unreadable for anyone who doesn't have the actual text of the story n front of them. Fortunately, this is 2016, and you can find that he...
