Never lie in print; Spain’s books grow; banal book bans: Newsletter 29 October 2025
Newsletter 121: Why is so much harder to lie in print . . . and could that save us all? Plus concentrating on what AI is bad at, an AI-enabled publishing imprint, three people to follow and three books to read.
I can’t lie in print
I’ve noticed something about myself and I want to see if it applies to you, too. It’s about lying.
Everybody lies. I am very much in favor of not lying, but I lie just like everyone else from time to time.
“Your book cover looks great!” (Actually, it doesn’t, but I don’t want to rain on your parade.)
“That’s an interesting idea.” (In fact, I find it commonplace, but I’d prefer not to argue about it right now.)
“I’m busy that day.” (I need a break from you.)
“I eat healthy food.” (Yeah, I’m eating better. No, I haven’t stopped consuming a cookie from time to time or a greasy burger in a burger joint.)
After 65+ years on this planet, I’ve forgiven myself for the occasional lie for noble or justifiable reasons.
But I hate to lie in print. I cannot accept falsity in writing
If an editor changes my writing to something that isn’t 100% accurate, I have to change it back. It’s an obsession.
I will not misstate or inappropriately distort a statistic.
I will not lie to make myself look better.
I will not lie or distort descriptions of an event I was present at.
I cannot accept descriptions of other events that I know are wrong or have a wrong emphasis.
And it’s not just my writing. If I edit you, I will not allow you to misstate the truth either. I won’t let you get away with an oft-stated stat that’s been debunked, or a misattributed quote. I won’t even let you get away with writing that’s accurate, but omits telling details.
There are a lot of us like this. Writing professionals generally find lying in print unacceptable. (Yes, even marketing writers.)
But I take it further.
I won’t lie in my blog. I won’t lie in my email. I won’t lie on social media. If I’m typing the words out and my name is associated with them, I’ll be damned if I let anything wrong, fake, or false appear.
This goes deeper than my reputation. It’s in my soul. Somehow, between my parents telling me not to lie and studying math and science in school and all the places I’ve written professionally for — and especially, my work as an analyst — this became part of who I am. Words in print — or on a screen — are my religion. Lying is blasphemy.
So please respond. Do you have the same emotional reaction to lying in printed material. Lying in a blog or other on-screen post? Lying in social media? Could you do it if it was going to benefit your career or make your quarterly number? Would you feel guilty?
Is it any different for you than lying while speaking?
Is it any different based on what generation you are in?
And if we can share this value, how can we use it to save humanity’s faith in the truth?
News for writers and others who think
Aaron Shulman asks, for writing professionals, is it foolish to focus on what AI can’t do? Not only is it not foolish, I think it’s obligatory.
The book business in Europe is down, after accounting for inflation. Except in Spain.
According to Pen America, book bans are, sadly, becoming routine.
As an academic exercise, Fred Zimmerman created an AI-enhanced book publishing imprint and declared “a human editor operating with state-of-the-art AI tools can achieve a 90% reduction in development time and similar labor cost savings while rapidly creating a functional imprint aimed at a sophisticated audience.”
Three people to follow
Lauren Hamlin, cofounder at Splash Literary and co-proprietor of the Move 37 Substack on AI in writing
Noah Giansiracusa , math professor studying the algorithms that control our lives
Jon Oltsik , truth-teller on cybersecurity issues
Three books to read
Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Knopf, 2025). Jeffrey Epstein’s most outspoken victim tells her shocking story in a posthumous memoir.
What You Need to Know About AI: A Primer on Being Human in an Artificially Intelligent World by James Wang (Manuscripts LLC, 2025). Concentrating on the human element amid the AI torrent.
Your Wit Is My Command: Building AIs with a Sense of Humor by Tony Veale (MIT Press, 2021). Why AIs are humorless and how to fix that.
Very well written and thought provoking
Amen to your stance on lying, in print or otherwise!
In his 1999 book, “The Alphabet versus the Goddess: ,” Leonard Shlain poses this brilliant concept: “The written word is essentially immortal. To a hyper-conscious primate who had become aware that death was inevitable, the discovery of a method to project one’s self beyond a single life span seemed nothing less than miraculous.”
If more people realized the impact, potential and actual, and durability of their written words, they’d be a lot more quiet. Falsehoods in print have a nasty habit of coming back and biting the liar in the ass – deservedly so.
I advocate, too, for the value and importance of retaining our words in print, not just electronically. An electronic document can be hacked and rewritten to suit the hacker. The last thing I want is some dweeb who doesn’t like my content, for whatever reason, rewriting it to favor his/her view, while keeping my name on the corruption. A dated, print copy is all the proof I need that I wrote what I wrote.
This is one reason why Wikipedia can never be considered a “clean” or accurate source of factual information – anyone can edit, add to, or delete any entry, and there’s no one at the gate vetting the edit. (I once saw an entry about Edgar Allen Poe, which stated that he was married to Mary Todd Lincoln. Who fact-checked that?)