Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [204]
Countless other people helped shape this book in different ways. Among them, I would like to thank Raoul Felder, Stephen Frug, Irna Gadd, Steve Hendricks, Harville Hendrix, William Hirst, Ward Jones, Patricia Kimble, Paul Levy, and Heidi Voskuhl (with gratitude for The Story of Human Error). I am indebted to Lee Ann Banaszak and Regina Wecker for helping me understand the history of women’s suffrage in Switzerland, and to Peter Neufeld and other members of the Innocence Project for their invaluable assistance on the subject of wrongful convictions. Massive thanks as well to Tod(d) Hymas Samkara, fact checker extraordinaire, who did his best—actually, the best—to save me from my own subject matter. In his case, it really is true that whatever errors remain are exclusively my own.
During the earliest stages of this project, I spent several months in Boston, where I was lucky enough to find an ideal intellectual community to help incubate the ideas in this book. Many thanks to Rebecca Saxe, Allan Adams, Peter Godfrey Smith, Josh Tenenbaum, Mira Bernstein, Tom Griffiths, and Tania Lombrozo. I’m especially indebted to Rebecca for pointing me in the direction of William Hirstein and Ward Jones—and, more generally, for her ongoing, unstinting, and immensely helpful interest in and insights about this project. Thanks, too, to MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Science Department, which gave me the chance to articulate some of the ideas in this book in public for the first time.
Other friends were generous with their ideas and even more generous with their support, humor, and patience during what proved to be a long and sometimes trying process. I could never thank all of them, or thank any of them enough. But, briefly: deep gratitude to Jill Krauss, Meg Thompson, Robyn Mierzwa, Jen Friedman, Janet Paskin, Jessi Hempel, Lassie Krishnaswami, Cat Hagarty, Amy Cohen, Laura Helton, Chip Giller, Camille Robcis, Yael Kropsky, Kevin Neel, Deborah Schimberg—and, especially, to Leslie Brooks, Emily Siegel, and Liv Gjestvang: always there. Thanks also to James Altucher and Anne Altucher, for the irreplaceable gift of more time at Spy Hill; to Ann and Howard Katz, for their open-armed support of this book and its author (and a much-needed eleventh-hour writing retreat in Vermont); to Denise Bilbao, for the sound files and other amazements; to Yoruba Richen, Noy Thrupkaew, and Stéphanie Giry, for fellowship in the fullest sense; to Amanda Griscom Little, for adventures tropical and lexical; to Jennifer Margulies, my oldest friend, mobile writing retreat, and outstanding last-minute editor; and to my friends in Oregon, for keeping the home fires burning—and especially to Celeste Baskett, without whom I’d be sunk.
A few people deserve special thanks—more, actually, than I know how to express. First among these are my parents, Margot and Isaac Schulz, who nurtured me (and still do) in an atmosphere of stable love and roving curiosity. I have benefited from their unwavering faith in this project more than they can know. My grandmother, Madeline Kann Price, has likewise been steadfast in her love and encouragement. My sister, Laura Schulz, is righter when she is wrong than most of us are when we are right. Her staggeringly large contributions to this book (intellectual and otherwise) are dwarfed only by her place in my heart. I am grateful beyond bounds to her and to the family she has brought into my life: my sister-in-law, Sue Kaufman, who added invaluable insights throughout this book, and who has never once faltered in the provision of support, perspective, sound advice,