Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Rolling Stone, and the Boston Globe. Schulz won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for feature writing and won a National Magazine Award for a story on the seismic risk of the Pacific Northwest, “The Really Big One.”

The author uses personal experiences as well as academic research to make her case about why we should view being wrong in a different, more optimistic light. Through her anecdotes and inclusion of philosophy, psychology, and more, Schulz argues her point of view using relatable and reliable information as a journalist.

On her website and in many interviews, Schulz names herself the “world’s leading wrongologist”—a testament to error’s importance to her. Throughout Being Wrong, the heart of her thesis is a celebration of error as a form of education and transformation. She is passionate about education, and, in a 2016 interview with The Brown Daily Herald (the newspaper of her alma mater), she affirms the necessity of error for all learning:

I would just encourage people to remember that college is a laboratory for error.