Ruth Shalit Barrett

The Atlantic has retracted an article in its November 2020 issue written by Princeton University alumna and former plagiarist Ruth Shalit Barrett, citing “serious concerns about its accuracy.” The article, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents”, is about parents making their children take up elite sports like fencing and lacrosse to get them into elite colleges.

In the mid-90s, Ruth Shalit was a rising star, writing for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Observer and becoming an associate editor at The New Republic at the age of 24. She was in demand because of her conservative outlook and her enthusiasm for baiting Clinton liberals in Washington (her sister, Wendy Shalit, is a conservative writer and the author of A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (1999)). However, she was found to have plagiarized articles she wrote for The New Republic in August 1994 and June 1995, and the magazine was forced to print apologies. According to a story about the Atlantic retraction in The New York Times, Barrett denied that she had plagiarized the articles. She claimed that she had confused her typewritten notes with articles she had downloaded for research. You can judge for yourself with some further examples of plagiarism printed in Mother Jones in the same year. However, after a controversial story of hers about affirmative action at The Washington Post was found to have many errors, she was accused by the Post‘s executive editor of demonstrating “a shameful absence of journalistic standards.” She took a six-month leave of absence, returning to The New Republic to write “cultural criticism, book reviews and trend pieces.” In 1999 she left The New Republic and Washington for good and took a job in New York, developing campaign strategies at the advertising agency Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and very occasionally writing for publications like The Wall Street Journal. She remained a member of a rogue’s gallery of famous plagiarists, however. She later moved to LA, married, and took her husband’s last name (Barrett), and wrote as Ruth Shalit Barrett for publications like Elle and New York Magazine (which raised some eyebrows). She now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her family.

Fast forward to this November and her article in The Atlantic. The article is “laden with factual problems and misleading passages“, according to her old foe, The Washington Post. The main subject of the article, a mother identified only by her middle name, Sloane, has a completely fictitious son, and there are falsehoods about the serious fencing injuries sustained by her daughters. After she was challenged about the fictitious son, Barrett told her editors that Sloane had lied to her about having a son. But, according The Atlantic, “The next day, when we questioned her again, she admitted she was “complicit” in “compounding the deception” and that “it would not be fair to Sloane” to blame her alone for deceiving The Atlantic.” The editors concluded that “Barrett deceived The Atlantic and its readers about a section of the story that concerns a person referred to as “Sloane.””

In explaining its decision to assign an article to a former plagiarist, The Atlantic says that “more than two decades separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic” and “in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines.” They “took into consideration the argument that Barrett deserved a second chance to write feature stories such as this one.” However, they now believe that “We were wrong to make this assignment.”

The article appeared under the byline “Ruth S. Barrett”. In retracting, as opposed to removing, the article (it is still available as a pdf), the magazine has also updated the byline to “Ruth Shalit Barrett”, so as not to hide the identity of the former plagiarist, now turned fabulist. In becoming a fabulist, of course, she has followed in the footsteps of other associate editor at The New Republic, Stephen Glass.

Coda: In January 2022, just over a year after this post was published, Ruth Shalit Barrett brought a lawsuit against The Atlantic, accusing The Atlantic and Donald Peck, its top print editor at the time, of defamation. She is asking for $1 million in damages.

The New York Times reported a recent study by Brock University of 451 adults, aged 20 to 82. The study found that thirty-four percent of COVID-19-positive participants said that they had denied having symptoms when asked by others, and fifty-five percent reported some level of concealment of their symptoms.

The Times article is terrible. It cites a study on lying from 1996, and randomly interviews several psychologists, one of whom thinks that people typically tell three lies within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. This only illustrates how loosely lying is defined by many psychologists.

The Washington Post did better. It published a link to the study and interviewed Angela Evans, the psychology professor at Brock who conducted the study. It also interviewed people about their behavior during the pandemic. One man in Alaska, Mark Plimpton, has flown to Northern Virginia to see his brother three times during the pandemic but has not shared photos after he got some “judgmental comments” on social media about his first trip. “These people,” Mark said, “they live with their families or they have family in the local area around them. I don’t, and the only way I can see my family is by getting on an airplane and traveling to the East Coast.” As the article notes, correctly, “He didn’t lie, per se, but he went out of his way not to advertise what he was doing.”

The same can be said about Emily (she did not want her full name to be given), who is “hosting a Thanksgiving celebration for about 25 people” for the sake of her grandmother. Her grandmother has dementia, and “cut off from her church community and unfamiliar with technology” she has “felt depressed this year.” Despite Emily’s plan to “get together outdoors, wear masks when they’re preparing the meal, leave windows open in the bathroom and serve food in small groups,” she is “not comfortable telling her friends, who sometimes seem to try to one-up each other with who’s being the most cautious about the virus.”

Emily, as the author of the Post‘s article, Marisa Iati, might have made clearer to readers, is keeping a secret from her friends, not lying to them. For more on the distinction between keeping a secret and lying, see my  “Secrets vs. Lies: Is There a Moral Asymmetry?” For a summary of the Brock University study, see here.

Bridget Anne Kelly, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Chris Christie, and Bill Baroni, former Port Authority Deputy Executive Director, had their convictions for wire fraud, fraud on a federally funded program or entity (the Port Authority), and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 7, 2020. It is true, the Court ruled, that both Kelly and Baroni “used deception” to “reduce from three to one the number of lanes long reserved at the George Washington Bridge’s toll plaza for Fort Lee’s morning commuters.” They claimed that the “lane realignment was for a traffic study,” when it was for “no reason other than political payback,” because Fort Lee’s major had refused to back Governor Christie’s 2013 reelection campaign. Nevertheless, as Justice Kagan wrote in the Court’s opinion, “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime. Because the scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property, Baroni and Kelly could not have violated the federal-program fraud or wire fraud laws.”