Episode 9: Don't Get It Twisted 🤨, a Conversation with my Fact Checker

I was originally going to title this episode “Facts Matter,” but instead chose the 90s hiphop version of that sentiment, as I’m prone to do.

We wanted to bring you this episode last week but I had such a bad cold that I lost my voice and sounded like a malfunctioning frog. So instead you got a Climate Variety Show photo dump and a Holiday Gift Guide 🎁 for People Who Give a Sh*t. Not a bad tradeoff, I’d say.

And today! We are peeling back the curtain on how I achieved the maximum possible accuracy and precision in my book What If We Get It Right?: I hired a fact checker named James Gaines.

With James Gaines at Elliot Bay Book Company. (We didn’t hire a photographer for this event, so this is the best I’ve got!)

James is a freelance science writer, journalist, and fact checker with a special focus on solutions journalism, which we love. He grew up in a cabin in the woods in Texas, and as the child of two librarians, loves a good footnote. He comes by it honestly: his pedigree is people who sweat the details.

I’ve worked with James for years – first on the All We Can Save anthology, then on the How to Save a Planet podcast. So when I got the invitation from Elliot Bay Book Company to do a book tour event in Seattle (where James lives), I knew just the conversation I wanted to have. So, tune in as we reveal which facts were the hardest to check, my aversion to the term “my truth,” and how we got to the bottom of things, together.

A treat: Here’s the poem I read to close out this episode, “To Be of Use” by Marge Piercy. It’s one of my all-time favorites and it’s the last poem that appears in What If We Get It Right? You may notice me slow down to emphasize my favorite line: “The work of the world is common as mud.” Yes. Mostly unglamorous, often solitary, sometimes tedious, and that’s just fine as long as it’s a contribution to the transformation we need.

So good, right? Thank you, Marge Piercy, for putting it just exactly right. Now that I’m reading it yet again, these two lines seem surprisingly applicable for fact checking: “But the thing worth doing well done / has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.” Ahh, I do know that feeling, thanks in no small part to James Gaines.

Hope you enjoy this episode. Another one is coming your way next week... stay tuned. xo

CREDITS: This episode was produced and edited by Nora Saks and me, with recording assistance in Seattle from John O’Brien. Big thanks to James Gaines and Elliot Bay Book Company. Check out James’ website, jmgaines.com, to find out more about all the cool work that he’s doing. And as always, huge thanks to my chief of staff (and tour producer) Jenisha Shrestha.