by Daniel Smith
• • •
In a 2009 New Yorker essay, John McPhee wrote that it is characteristic of fact-checkers to be “calmer than marble.” This is incorrect. Checkers are no less nervous than any other people. On average they may even be more nervous. Amy Meeker, a former head of the Atlantic’s checking department, says that all checkers “need a certain amount of anxiety to do the job well.” What she means is that fact-checking requires alertness, and anxiety fosters this.
The psychological problem the anxious checker faces is that the small amount of anxiety he needs to do the job well tends, in the hothouse of the work, to bloom, overshadowing and smothering the work’s potential benefits. Learning to address concerns methodically, with reference to logic and empirical evidence, is one of the most useful things an anxious person can do. But it is a skill best learned, at least at first, in a pressureless environment. And fact-checking is never pressureless. Even at Whitworth’s Atlantic, with its stately, salon-like atmosphere, the pressures were many and potent.
There was time pressure, of course. Even before you set a straight edge beneath an article’s first fact, you know the clock is spinning down, time marching off to the brink. Fact-checkers become very attuned very quickly to the magazine’s production schedule. They become attuned, also, to how time can change its pace according to one’s mindset. In his essay, McPhee also wrote, “In one’s head . . . things speed up in the ultimate hours.” On this he’s correct. More than twenty years after checking an article about Central America, Meeker can still remember jolting awake in bed at 3 a.m. the day before closing, the names of Salvadoran villages racing through her head.
Even worse than the time pressure is the social pressure. On the whole, writers are as anxious as fact-checkers, if not more so. Contrary to popular belief, however, they have less anxiety-provoking jobs. Once a reporter has informed a subject of what he is writing about, he often can conduct an interview in almost total silence and still get all the information he needs. Checkers don’t have this luxury. Checkers always have to engage people actively—people whom they did not choose to engage and who very often have no interest in being engaged. When you’re anxious, this is excruciating, for as an anxious person you have a supersensory ability to detect judgments—false judgments, but still—in the coughs, tics, throat-clearings, sniffs, pauses, ums, ahs, likes, and let’s sees that occur in all normal conversations. And fact-checking entails a lot of conversation, almost always with strangers.
At the risk of presenting the Atlantic’s content at the time I worked there as inordinately urinary, here is an example. In late 1999, I had to call the Icelandic Phallological Museum—a museum about penises—to check a series of facts about the institution that appeared in a travel essay by Cullen Murphy, the magazine’s managing editor. While confirming with the curator, one Sigurdur Hjartarson, that his museum did in fact have on display the penises of all Icelandic mammals excluding man and a single species of whale,1 I all of a sudden fell into a twisted tunnel of anxiety. First, going on nothing but the exuberance in Hjartarson’s voice, I became certain that he was interpreting the tension in my own voice as disapproval. Then, bringing the anxiety to its next level, I became certain that he was right, that the anxiety I was feeling did spring from some deep-rooted prudery, a discomfort with anything but the most traditional displays of sexuality, and that this meant (moving on quickly to the next level now) that the anxiety I’d been struggling with ever since I lost my virginity wasn’t so much a genetic problem or an emotional disorder as it was a kind of sex phobia, a conclusion that scared and disoriented me because it directly contradicted my image of myself as open-minded and progressive and suggested that perhaps at heart I was really conservative and rigid and hung up on all sorts of things I didn’t know I was hung up on . . . and I became so entangled by all this, as Hjartarson talked with great energy about the different lengths, shapes, circumferences, and functionalities of the specimens available to the North Atlantic phallus collector, that I began to sweat right through my shirt.
Much more about sweat in a moment. First, a more abstract problem related to the social pressures of fact-checking. A checker doesn’t just spend a lot of his time calling strangers, he spends a lot of his time calling strangers who happen to be internationally renowned experts in their fields. Moreover, these strangers happen to be internationally renowned experts in fields about which, more often than not, the checker hasn’t even read an introductory textbook. This is inevitable. Unless you plan on getting up to speed in, say, applied molecular physics in a couple of weeks, you’re going to need to find and beg the help of a lot of trusted authorities. Fortunately, trusted authorities are generally very nice and generous people. One gets the sense that they enjoy trying to explain their disciplines to ordinary mortals. But the fact remains that they know everything and you know nothing, and this makes it not only intimidating to have a conversation but difficult even to come up with the vocabulary without which a productive conversation will be impossible. Far worse than mere discomfort and status anxiety, however, is how these interactions make it hard even to function in your work, because being internationally renowned experts who sometimes speak in incomprehensible jargon, these people have the habit of exposing the job you’re being paid $30k plus benefits per annum to do as possibly completely bogus. They have this habit because they, and not you, are the ones who are qualified to judge the ultimate truth of the piece of writing you have called to discuss. What you are qualified to do is slash facts off a sheet of paper, one by one, until you’ve slashed them all. But as Meeker says, there’s a big difference between confirming facts and establishing reality: “You can get every single detail right and it still won’t mean the whole is true.” This is why some of the most anxiety-provoking assignments a checker can get are the ones where the author and the expert are one and the same: It makes you feel fraudulent and useless to check the math of gods. It makes you ask yourself some unsettling questions about Truth. It makes you wonder if maybe you’ve hitched your wagon to the wrong epistemological horse. It makes you want to go back through your assignments and underline everything, every and, the, if, and but—or else nothing at all. It makes you wonder if you have the first inkling of what’s good for you.
12.
the pits
Sweat: it is the great unspoken foe of the chronically anxious. It has no rival. Gnashed cuticles can be bandaged. Tears can be choked back. Intimations of catastrophe can be kept secret. But sweat—sweat is the mark of Cain.
Millennia ago, when Homo sapiens were evolving on the African plains, it was necessary to sweat when you sensed danger. Sweat cooled your body so you wouldn’t overheat as you fled a predator. Sweat made your body slippery so you would be harder to grab hold of. Nature was wise to give us sweat glands. Then, in the 1920s, Freon was synthesized and nature’s plan was forever altered. In the modern, climate-controlled office building, sweat has no practical use whatsoever. All it can do is expose a person’s jitters to those around him, causing him to grow more jittery, causing him to sweat more, causing him to grow more jittery, causing him to sweat more, and so on and so forth in a soul-degrading circle of humiliation and dread. Among the most important questions a contemporary anxiety sufferer has to ask himself, therefore, is, “What should I do about my armpits?”
The web site livingwithanxiety.com gives the following advice regarding excessive sweating, a condition known in medical terms as hyperhidrosis: “A good way to prevent this is to relax, so you can control triggering stress that causes this anxiety symptom.” This is somewhat less than helpful, like saying to a person in horrible pain because cancer is eating into his bones, “A good way to prevent this is not to allow your cells to proliferate, so you can control triggering tumors that cause this cancer symptom.” The fact of the matter is, so long as a person remains anxious the only thing he will be able to do about his sweat, short of removing or paralyzing his sweat glands (some dermatologists offer Botox injections for hype
rhidrosis), is conceal it.
Dark clothing is advisable. So is a jacket of some sort, though in warm weather it will exacerbate the problem and cause the cluelessly observant to inquire why you are overdressed. The most effective method I’ve found so far is to use a material of some sort to soak up the perspiration as it comes. You have to choose your material wisely, however. Once during a temp job I wedged a wad of toilet paper into my underarms to stanch the flow. This worked well until I was called over to consult with my supervisor. As I was leaning over her desk to explain a report I had written the wad dislodged, rolled down my shirt sleeve, and landed beside her keyboard with a sickening splat.
Sometime later, in a state of desperation, I discovered sweat pads. I had been assigned to write an article about American expatriates in Dubai, where the average temperature during my stay was going to be about 170 degrees in the shade. This ruled out a sports coat and sent me on a frenzied hunt for a product that would get me through the trip unmortified. It wasn’t long before I learned of a company called Kleinert’s—“The World’s Authority on Sweat Protection.” The company’s signature product is the disposable sweat pad, which it describes as “highly absorbent, noiseless, thin, discreet, convenient, easily applied disposable unisex underarm shields which adhere (peel & stick) securely to all fabrics including silks providing outstanding protection from odors and wet-thru staining.” I ordered a case of twenty-four, enough to get both of my underarms through ten soggy days of reporting.
It fortified my confidence to read that the company has been manufacturing sweat pads since the Grant administration. Once I was in the desert, however, I was forced to conclude that in their nearly 140 years of business the good folks at Kleinert’s had yet to encounter a case as acute as mine. By lunchtime on most days, the sweat had fully inundated the pads and begun to transcend their boundaries, producing a corona of moisture beneath each arm that was even more conspicuous than an old-fashioned, solid sweat stain. There was also an adhesion problem. Kleinert’s is justly proud of its adhesive technology. The shields, which are shaped like morbidly obese butterflies, come outfitted with three parallel strips of tape that adhere wonderfully to your average male dress shirt—too wonderfully, was the problem. Perhaps the fault lay not with Kleinert’s but with the piercing intensity of the Dubai heat, but on more than one occasion the glue from the tape seeped into the fabric of my shirts, resulting in permanent strips of darkened material that look, ironically, like sweat stains.
The experience soured me for a while on sweat pads. I took to wearing a lot of black, and stayed home as much as possible. Then, one average Sunday afternoon, my wife returned from Costco carrying a box of 96-count jumbo packs of Always Ultra Thin™ feminine hygiene pads with Flexi-Wings and LeakGuard Core™ barriers. (“This is gonna last me through menopause!” she said), and I had one of those Archimedes-in-the-bathtub moments.
“Of course,” I thought. “Why hadn’t I thought of that before?” Naturally, the Kleinert’s pads had been inadequate. How many people buy disposable underarm shields? Not a lot. But there are more than three billion women on the planet. Feminine hygiene is a $13 billion a year business. Thirteen billion dollars buys you a lot of high-class R&D. It buys you absorbency so cutting edge it’s like the sweat is being sucked into a different dimension. It buys you adhesiveness that’s like some alien technology; you can peel the pad off your shirt and put it back on again a dozen times and it’ll stay just as sticky as before. It buys you maximum performance with minimum size, discomfort, or audible rustling.
From then on, whenever I have had to leave the house to meet someone it behooves me not to repulse, I have worn beneath my arms a product expertly designed by a multinational corporation to absorb eighty milliliters of menstrual blood at a wearing.
• • •
I wish I had known thirteen years ago what I know now about the versatility of the maxi pad, for it was my sweating that began to make life at the Atlantic truly intolerable. A painful pattern to my existence emerged. Every night I would go home to rejuvenate myself with drink and sleep, and every morning I would return to confront a series of forces that substantiated and anatomized the very anxiety I was desperate to escape: the galley pages color-coded like the old federal terror alert system; clippings, reference material, and transcripts testifying to the delusion that, with the correct titration of effort, solid ground could be found; the imposing editorial staff watching over my shoulder to make sure that even the assertions made in the poetry were sufficiently verified. By 10 a.m. my undershirt would be drenched. By 10:30 the sweat would breach the outer garment, planting a seed of moisture at the bulge beneath the arm where the two seams of fabric intersect. By 11 a.m. the seed would sprout, creeping up to the shoulder from both sides, down the trunk, and down the arm. Then it would become all about flood control. For the rest of the day I would make frequent trips to the men’s room to get myself dry.
The men’s room at the Atlantic didn’t have an electric dryer. All it had was a canister of thin paper towels stamped with dots and folded into thirds. I made these towels work for me as best I could. I would take a stack with me into the handicapped stall, remove my shirt, line my hand with a towel or two, and squeeze first one shirt underarm and then another in my fist, to sop up the worst of it. Then I’d start scrubbing. The trick was to scrub very fast. The faster I scrubbed the more friction and heat was produced. But I had to be careful not to scrub so fast that it would compromise the structural integrity of the paper towel, which had the habit of disintegrating when it took on too much water and which, in the process of disintegrating, deposited dozens of white pellets on the insides of my shirts. (They looked like miniature cotton fields.) All this cut down markedly on the life span of my dress shirts, but it did the trick—for a while. An hour or so later I would be back on my way to the bathroom, arms pinned to my sides like Frankenstein’s monster.
I tried not to consider what my coworkers thought was wrong with me. Dysentery? Urinary-tract infection? Bulimia? All I knew was that it was a deeply unproductive and disagreeable way to spend my days. On my trips to the men’s room I would pass the office of Peter Davison, the longtime poetry editor. Davison had been a protégé of Robert Frost’s, a friend of Robert Lowell’s, and a lover of Sylvia Plath’s. I would much rather have been sitting with Davison hearing stories about dead poets than ministering to my armpits. I’d much rather have been getting my eyelashes weed-whacked than ministering to my armpits. As in college, it was the lack of solitude that most rankled. Surrounded by people—and, of course, by my facts, my inextinguishable facts—I felt as if I were living in an emergency room, with all the light-headed unreality that setting causes.
Yet I also felt, for the first time, truly and sincerely pissed. It was enough already. Enough! I’d reached that point that comes in the life of most anxiety sufferers when, fed up by the constant waking torture, dejected and buckled but not yet crushed, they at last turn to their anxiety, to themselves, and say, “Listen here: Fuck you. Fuck you! I am sick and fucking tired of this bullshit. I refuse to let you win. I am not going to take it anymore. You are ruining my fucking life and you MUST FUCKING DIE!”
Unfortunately, this approach rarely solves the problem. Anxiety doesn’t bend to absolutism. You have to take a subtler, more reasoned approach. But that doesn’t mean anger is totally unhelpful. Being pissed off is a strong cocktail for the will. It stiffens the spine. It strengthens resolve. It makes a person less willing to run away from the anxiety and more willing to walk into it, which you’re going to have to do, ultimately, if you don’t want to end up a complete agoraphobic. Anger breeds defiance, and defiance is inspiriting. It’s good to refuse to give in to anxiety. You just have to know how much you can take.
• • •
I have on my desk a summons from the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, stamped by the county clerk’s office October 1, 2003. The summons is stapled to a sixteen-page complaint suing me and
the publishing house Houghton Mifflin for libel for $23 million. When I received the complaint I was living in a roach-infested former tenement building in Manhattan. The lawsuit was the culmination of an ordeal that had begun almost three years earlier with the publication of my first piece of writing—a long, in-depth article about electroshock therapy. The article, which was titled “Shock and Disbelief,” was a professional triumph for me. It appeared in The Atlantic when I was twenty-three and was selected to be included in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. It was also a personal disaster. The article resulted, in order of occurrence, in the following: the longest, most debilitating bout with anxiety of my life thus far; my panic-stricken, half-crazed self-removal from the staff of The Atlantic; the termination of a two-year-long cohabiting relationship with a beautiful, intelligent, patient, comes-along-once-in-a-life-time kind of woman; grief and despair of Old Testament proportions; and an extended period of psychic bottom-dwelling.
In retrospect, it should have been clear from the start that electroshock therapy was not the wisest subject with which to pop my journalistic cherry. In mental health circles, electroshock is as controversial as partial-birth abortion is in political circles. The controversy breaks down along fairly clear lines. Psychiatrists are generally in favor of electroshock. They have seen the treatment pull people out of profound, catatonic depressions, and back from the cusp of suicide. In Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness, the psychiatrist David Healy and the historian Edward Shorter call electroshock “powerful and beneficial . . . safe and effective.” They write: “ECT is, in a sense, the penicillin of psychiatry.”