is it fake?

For when you need to know whether violet eyes really mean you have magical hairless superpowers.

[isitfake]

A list of rejections of famous authors was circulating on Tumblr awhile back and, because Is It Fake was in exams at the time, Is It Fake got really into debunking them. It has now been more than a year and Is It Fake is just gonna put it up and let this roll.

See, they’re all or almost all from Rotten Rejections, a book written with a marvelous disregard for facts, and they’ve therefore been in circulation for more than twenty-five years. Some of them are entirely true; some of them are totally fake; a lot of them appear only in Rotten Rejections but can’t otherwise be disproven. Many of the stories behind them are fantastic.

As a general note, although this was only really useful for Plath, if you enjoy this we recommend “Publication is Not Recommended: From the Knopf Archives,” which is available on Project MUSE if you’ve got access and is just… it’s wonderful. Blanche Knopf was a riot.

Okay, let’s get going!

TRUE

Sylvia Plath: There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.

Not only true, but actually much worse than depicted here. Internal rejection only. The editor, having been told that this is contest-winner Sylvia Plath’s book, rereads, and is marginally nicer and 500% more patronizing: "maybe now that this book is out of her system she will use her talent more effectively next time.” Accurate text available here: http://cloudyskiesandcatharsis.tumblr.com/post/57272275430/sylvia-plath-originally-submitted-her-novel-the

Emily Dickinson: [Your poems] are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.

True! Thomas Niles to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 10, 1890— the brackets are wrong, because he was addressing another possible publisher, to say that he thought it would be “unwise to perpetuate” the poems, oh my STARS.

Ernest Hemingway (on The Torrents of Spring): It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.

True, and directly to Hemingway himself. To F Scott Fitzgerald he managed to get up an “I am less violently opposed to Torrents of Spring than anyone else who has read it” but to Hemingway himself, nope, full no.

William Faulkner: If the book had a plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions, but it is so diffuse that I don’t think this would be of any use. My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell. And two years later: Good God, I can’t publish this!

True. Both are true. They are so true.

The first refers to Sartoris/Flags in the Dust, and the story is really funny and sad. Faulkner sent it to Horace Liveright (his publisher) with enormous confidence: he called it the “damdest best book you’ll look at this year” and tried to ensure at this early stage that the printer not screw up his punctuation (“he’s been punctuating my stuff to death; giving me gratis quotation marks and premiums of commas I dont need.”) He also insisted that the title was perfect and that he had designed his own dust jacket which he would send by separate cover. Anyway, bye, he was going on a hunting trip, he looked forward to Liveright’s glowing acceptance!

Liveright did not exactly… do that. Besides the quote above he also noted how much he hated Mosquitoes, Faulkner’s last book, and how disappointed he was w/this one and how much he really wanted Faulkner not to submit it anywhere else, in case he got blacklisted, because the book was so, so bad.

WHOOPS

(Thanks to "Flags in the Dust and the Birth of a Poetics” by Arthur F. Kinney for those quotes.)

The second is about Sanctuary, a book Faulkner hated and described as a “cheap idea…deliberately executed to make money.” The full rejection, according to Faulkner in his introduction to the book, was “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.”

Edgar Allan Poe: Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.

Not quite the exact quote, because “(especially fiction)” should appear after “works” and “entire” should be “whole”— but true. Harper & Brothers rejected Tales from the Folio Club in 1836 with this phrasing, the second of their three reasons for turning the stories down. The first was that a lot of them had been printed already, and the third was that the papers were too “learned and mystical,” like spooky bonbons.

http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19781c.htm

Poe responded to this by writing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which he privately referred to as a “very silly book”, and which is a classic of American literature.

MIXED TRUE/FALSE

Jack London: [Your book is] forbidding and depressing.

Sort of true. This rejection is from the Atlantic on the 3rd of May, 1900, it’s about “The Law of Life”, and it was a lot nicer than this, because according to Ellery Sedgwick’s "A History of the Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide”, this was a period in which the Atlantic was being very ruthless and cynical about what would run, because depressing things didn’t sell commercially.

The full quote is, “We have heartily liked the vigor of it and the breadth of treatment with which you have written it. But the subject is forbidding—in fact seems to us depressing, and so the excellent craftsmanship of it has not changed our mind."

Stephen King (on Carrie): We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.

True, but not about Carrie. It’s from Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books and it’s about the Richard Bachman book The Running Man, which King had written after Carrie got rejected basically everywhere in the world. “The book, unfortunately, was not fantastic,” he later commented, which might’ve been because he wrote it over a weekend in a “low rage and simmering despair.” Thanks to the Stephen King Companion for this one.

UNATTESTED (AND, ONE SUSPECTS, NOT REAL)

Rudyard Kipling: I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.

Unattested. ID’d as the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner or Call writing in 1889, or is it 1899? Yeah, probs not, and Is It Fake couldn’t find it.

That said, the Call fucking hated Kipling. For example, the San Francisco Call did write about Kipling in 1899; it castigated him for his poem “the White Man’s Burden,” saying, “the white man’s burden is to set and keep his own house in order. It is not required of him to upset the brown man’s house under pretesce of reform and then whip him into subjection whenever he revolts at the treatment.” (Among other sources, can be found here.)

Another review of “The Lesson” from 1901 opens "KIPLING'S latest poem, 'The Lesson,’ must be very gratifying to Mr. Alfred Austin, for, if it does not confirm Austin's right to the office of Poet Laureate, it at least shows that Kipling has no better right.” 

Dr. Seuss: Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.

Unattested. But he was indeed rejected 27 times for his first book. 

The Diary of Anne Frank: The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.

Unattested. The diary was rejected by 15 publishers before publication, but Is It Fake can’t find any of them who specifically said this. Here’s one from Knopf:

In the summer of 1950, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. turned down the English-language rights to a Dutch manuscript after receiving a particularly harsh reader’s report. The work was “very dull,” the reader insisted, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely,” the reader wrote, “I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.”

Joseph Heller (on Catch–22): I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.

Unattested. Catch-22 (or as it was called at the time, Catch-18) was rejected over and over again, but this exact language is just vapor.

On the other hand, we have some of the language of acceptance, thanks to Vanity Fair:

“I … love this crazy book and very much want to do it,” Gottlieb said. Candida Donadio was delighted by his enthusiasm. Finally, someone got it! “I thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall off,” she often said to describe her happiness when negotiations went well with an editor.

And this incredible rejection from Evelyn Waugh:

Dear Miss Bourne:

Thank you for sending me Catch-22. I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady’s reading

You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches—often repetitious—totally without structure.

Much of the dialogue is funny. You may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”

George Orwell (on Animal Farm): It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.

Unattested. It was rejected for a lot of reasons, but most of the ones I can find histories of were basically for it being anti-USSR at a time when the Russians were war allies. One publisher was basically ordered not to run it so as not to hurt the war effort, by somebody who later turned out to be a Soviet spy, like a lot of people in wartime Britain.

If you want to read T. S. Eliot rejecting Animal Farm for being too pro-Communist (not a joke) (jazz hands), you can find that here. 

Vladimir Nabokov (on Lolita): … overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.

Unattested. Could be real and internal, but it was never given to Nabokov, because Nabokov gave us a recounting of his rejections, and this wasn’t in them.

Is It Fake’s fave bit: "Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that the firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, realistic sentences. (He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy. Etc.)"

Richard Bach (on Jonathan Livingston Seagull): will never make it as a paperback. (Over 7.25 million copies sold)

Unattested, and Is It Fake doesn’t even have anything interesting to say about it.

H.G. Wells (on The War of the Worlds): An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would “take”…I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book’. And (on The Time Machine): It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader

Unattested. It is the personal opinion of Is It Fake that they’re both false. The Time Machine was actually commissioned as a novel, so it’s hard to see why it’d receive a rejection like that, and both stories were serialized before publication, not run in book form, so the War of the Worlds one doesn’t ring true. Fun supplemental fact--War of the Worlds was immediately pirated upon release and rerun as “Fighters from Mars,” localized to New York and Boston respectively and run with a story called “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” about how Thomas Edison took over Mars and Is It Fake is not making this up.

Herman Melville (on Moby Dick): We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the Juvenile Market in [England]. It is very long, rather old-fashioned…

This must be false (no one ever appears to have been under the delusion that Moby-Dick was a children’s serial, and in fact he got it printed kind of as like an art book, a 500-book edition with great critical acclaim and no sales) but since one can’t actually prove that it is, “unattested,” but Is It Fake would like to register the strongest possible objections to anyone who would bother to make up a reason for Herman Melville to be sad, dude was like high king and priest of making his own ass sad in the desert, leave him alone

If for some reason your life has been missing negative reviews of Moby-Dick you can find the full spectrum of praise to castigation here. Personal fave goes to the writer who said “There is nevertheless in it, as we have already hinted, abundant choice reading for those who can skip a page now and then, judiciously....”

PROVABLY FAKE >:(

Oscar Wilde (on Lady Windermere’s Fan): My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.

False. Is It Fake can’t believe even people talking about Oscar Wilde are getting the Oscar Wilde effect. It’s attributed to a bunch of people, but the oldest attribution found was to John Clayton, from Albert Chevalier’s autobiography of 1895, as

“My dear sir, I have read your play. Oh! my dear sir! Yours truly, John Clayton.”

As Albert Chevalier was a comedian & music hall performer and this is part of a collection of anecdotes, one is perhaps not super convinced this was ever real, from anyone. (There’s also a fwithout the last line: “My dear sir, I have read your play. Yours, Fred Thompson.”

Gertrude Stein spent 22 years submitting before getting a single poem accepted.

Possibly true, in that Is It Fake can’t find the date of publication of her first poem, but not substantively true, in that Three Lives ran when she was 35, so unless we’re counting whatever she submitted at 13, this is false. Stein was constantly and continually rejected though. Like just absolutely constantly, and crushingly too. This rejection letter is particularly amazing.

[mentalflossr]

[isitfake]

this isn’t even slightly true, mental_floss. Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs has “it never rains but it pours” from 1726. I found "when it rains it pours” in books from 1855 and 1892.

[isitfake]

MIXED FAKE/TRUTH: Elie Wiesel held fucked-up opinions.

This post is currently circulating with reasons that we should not lionize Elie Wiesel– why he’s “transformed the memory of the Holocaust into a weapon for neoliberal colonialism.” I’ll take each in turn.

DISCLAIMER 1: Is This Fake is Jewish, and therefore slipping out of its third person role for this post.

DISCLAIMER 2: I am addressing this post specifically. Elie Wiesel also, and unquestionably, was a vocal and vehement Zionist, who while he believed in a two-state solution also backed settlements in Jerusalem and compared Hamas to the Nazis in the newspaper. A lot of that activity was recent (2014 is where I found the news stories from, when he was 85). If these beliefs are abhorrent to you... me too! But there’s a specific post circulating with claims about him that are substantively false or extremely misleading or just irrelevant. Here they are.

1. On Afro-Judaic relations: “The people who take their inspiration from us do not thank us but attack us. We find ourselves in a very dangerous situation. We are again the scapegoat on all sides… We helped the blacks; we always helped them… I feel sorry for blacks. There is one thing they should learn from us and that is gratitude. No people in the world knows gratitude as we do; we are forever grateful.” 

MOSTLY TRUE. This has been ellipsed by Norman Finkelstein, thank you Norman Finkelstein. Elie Wiesel unquestionably held fucked-up opinions about how much “gratitude” was required by Black civil rights leaders who took inspiration from Jewish ones, and whether it was appropriative for Black people to refer to their experience in America as “genocide.”

That said, I note that this quote is not complete, and indeed according to Finkelstein’s citations the quotes are separated by two pages in Against Silence vol. 3, Wiesel’s collected writings. I cannot access any full version of the text. Snippet view of the interview in that book and in Israel Magazine (the article appears to have been an interview with the writer Yaacov Agmon in 1970) indicates that serious context is missing-- but whether that context is good or bad, I really don’t know.

2. On the presence of Muslims at an interfaith Auschwitz ceremony: “Were we not forgetting … Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini of Jerusalem, Heinrich Himmler’s friend?” (The Mufti supported the Nazis, but had no role in the Holocaust. Wiesel insinuates that all Muslims bear some responsibility for the Holocaust).

EFFECTIVELY FALSE. This one is a quote from from Elie Wiesel’s most recent memoir that has been carefully edited, by Norman Finkelstein also, to remove some important context. The full quote, from And the Sea is Never Full, is:

Some found that strange. Had there been Muslims at Auschwitz? Were we not forgetting the SS Muslim divisions? And the Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini of Jerusalem, Heinrich Himmler’s friend? In 1942 Himmler acted as guide to this very place. Better to let it go.

That is the opposite sentiment.

3. He tried to get an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv cancelled. The reason: academic sponsors included sessions on the Armenian Genocide, against the wishes of the Israeli government. (Elie Wiesel is therefore a Holocaust denier of a different sort.) 

SUBSTANTIVELY FALSE IN RE: THE CONFERENCE; ENTIRELY FALSE IN RE: WIESEL BEING AN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DENIER. Elie Wiesel’s foundation, so far from being Armenian Genocide deniers, wrote a letter signed by 53 Nobel laureates– including Elie Wiesel– co-signing the conclusions of the Genocide Commission that the Armenian Genocide was exactly that. Here is that letter. Other, more forceful statements may easily be googled.

The conference to which OP refers took place in 1982. To quote Harut Sassounian, who in this article is calling out Wiesel for his misunderstanding of Armenian activists’ desire: “Mr. Wiesel, however, was not as forceful back in 1982 when the Israeli Foreign Ministry, under pressure from the Turkish government, asked him to exclude Armenian scholars from an international conference on the Holocaust and Genocide that was to be held in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Faced with the dilemma of not wanting to eliminate Armenian participation or acceding to Israeli government’s demands, Mr. Wiesel resigned as president of the conference [unless postponed]. He explained that he chose to remove himself rather than challenge the Israeli government’s demands, because he had to be mindful of the threat to Jewish lives in Turkey.” Here is the NYT article about it. Wiesel’s choice here was at best questionable and at worst cowardly. But Wiesel did not seek to have the conference cancelled– just postponed– and especially did not do so in order to pressure Armenian activists to withdraw. This contention is false.

4. Charged $25,000 plus chauffeured limo to speak at events.

UNDERSTATING THE TRUTH, ACTUALLY, ALTHOUGH IT’S UNCLEAR WHY THAT IS NEOLIBERAL OR COLONIALIST. In recent years Wiesel appears to have charged $50k.

[isitfake]

FAKE: ‘Controlling’ anti-prejudice messages may or may not work; it’s too soon to tell.

This study is currently circulating as an argument about anti-bias training causing “ironic” effects, i.e., if you restrictively tell someone how they ought to act, they fucking increase the fucking thing, even if that thing is prejudice.

This may be true. There are several reasons not to make any definite, sweeping statements based on it.

The most important reason to be cautious is that social psychology is going through a replication crisis. Actually, it turns out a lot of fields are, including cancer biology, but social psych kicked it off. Studies in the field are increasingly being shown to be statistical flukes. Of 100 studies that Brian Nosek tried to replicate with his team, only 39 showed an effect on a second run.

What we currently know about social psychology may be outnumbered by what we think we know and don’t.

This is caused by a lot of things! Some of it is fraud. Some of it’s p-hacking, tweaking variables until you get a statistically significant result. Some of it is bad experimental design; small sample sizes, big confounders. Andrew Gelman says a lot of it is the garden of forking paths: choosing the analysis you run on your data after you see the data, subconsciously trying to find a path to significance in the noise.

A lot of it, however, is just this: when you say that something is significant p<.05 (the field standard), what you’re saying is, in the universe where there’s no actual causal agent doing anything, you’d expect to see something like this result one out of every twenty times you ran this experiment. Just random fluctuation will make this happen one out of every twenty times. And we don’t publish failed experiments: the “file drawer” effect means that we’re selecting for those experiments which have already shown a result, whether or not that result is true.

So! We have a good reason to fear that this study is actually less likely than not to be true, just because it hasn’t been replicated. Here is poor Michael Inzlicht, a co-author of the study we’re discussing, blogging about the crisis and its consequences.

Now let’s look at the actual study itself. It can be downloaded directly from Lisa Legault’s ResearchGate site.

First of all, the population was 103 non-Black U. Toronto undergrads. Median age 18.8 years. Normally this would be the first problem, but since we’re discussing whether or not to use anger in a Tumblr conversation about race, it’s probably not a terrible proxy.

103 is small, though. This is a study with three possible conditions, so each group (control group, group presented with the autonomy brochure, group presented with the controlling brochure) was only 34 people.

The effect size is also small. Is It Fake has to eyeball this, but it looks like they estimate a prejudice score of 4.1 for people with the autonomy brochure, 4.5 for people with no brochure, and 4.7 with the control brochure. (That last one is within the margin of error to be no effect, actually.)

And finally, the effect is tested immediately after the intervention! Even if we assume that this study is totally robust and replicable and everything about its effects is right on, all this study says is that when presented with something adamant and controlling about racial attitudes, your first response is to shut down and become defensive. That may well be true! Is It Fake would certainly put good money on that proposition! But it is equally possible that humans forced to directly confront their ideas in this fashion, when they cool off, think harder and deeper about them than those who have had their hand held. Both may be true, depending on the person and the circumstance. We have very very little information on the topic. It’s much, much harder to study long-term effects.

Social psychology is a mess right now, and we know effectively nothing about how to change people’s minds. Less than nothing, because studies like this convince us that we do know more than we know. Be kind, or angry, or direct, or careful when confronting prejudice, whatever you think fits your values and will forward your goals best. But don’t try to tailor it to the prophecies of social psych, because they are not set up to handle it.

[isitfake]

Sometimes I get followers like "categorycats," thinking they're real people. See, the blog description makes total sense and everything. But I start to doubt their authenticity when I notice that they also post pics of women in their underwear. Or I might get followed by blogs that claim to post pictures of cute animals, but then they also post some "LOL" images that are very common in spam blogs, tagged with "cute" or "animals," even though there are no animals in the picture. Are these fake?

These blogs are indeed mostly fake!

Is It Fake has run into this problem on their main, where Is It Fake has recently being posting some very hilarious content, if they say so themselves. So is it getting picked up by legitimate aggregator? Or is this a bot? Mostly, Is It Fake goes back through a couple of pages of content to see if they’ve reblogged something they scraped from the “animals” tag which is about the band or whatever. The answer is always yes.

Is It Fake supports an aggressive block-and-flag strategy towards these bots, because they are incredibly annoying.

Cats, however, are probably real.

[isitfake]

TRUE: American culture, politics, and government are too white.

Strange Horizons released their SF reviews/reviewer count and it reminded Is It Fake that people actually dispute the above point. Here are some stats.

disclaimer: Is It Fake’s operator is white. also, Strange Horizons counts the Anglosphere and not just U.S. sources, so I haven’t actually included their results here.

According to the last full census of the U.S. (2010), non-Hispanic whites make up 64% of the United States; 73% of people identify as white counting white Hispanic/Latinx people. This number is certainly an underestimate for 2016, but it’s the best we have right now. That means that every national institution-- magazine, newspaper, college, university, award, television show, movie, sport, government, should have more than 27-36% people of color in it to be representative, depending on how you’re counting.

So, how representative is American society? By almost every single measure, not representative enough even for this baseline.

The stats below use a maximum figure where all Hispanic/Latinx people are counted as people of color, because the surveys mostly aren’t granular enough for me to break it down.

Current data:

18.5% of Congress are people of color. This number is a record.

22% of Supreme Court justices are people of color (counting either Antonin Scalia or Merrick Garland).

It’s hard to figure out how to count the executive branch-- 100% of current presidents and 0% of president nominees? However, Obama’s cabinet has been 35% people of color through 2015, the most representative category on this list.

33% of characters on T.V. are people of color. 

21% of people in the publishing industry are people of color. 14% of people at the executive level are. 11% of book reviewers are. These numbers are mostly white women.

12.8% of newspaper journalists are people of color. That number's been stagnant for the last 13 years.

Slightly outdated data:

23.5% of circuit court judges were people of color in 2014. (Of senior circuit court judges, 9.7% were people of color.) 25.2% of district court judges were people of color in 2014.

13.7% of writers on television shows were people of color in 2013/14.

7% of writers in film were people of color in 2012-2014.

In 2014, 23.1% of all characters in the top 100 films were people of color.

21% of all full-time faculty at the university level were people of color in 2013. 16% of full-time professors are.

The average doctor is more likely to be non-white than white. 51.1% of doctors were people of color in 2013! This figure is mostly Asians and Asian-Americans. 

All-time data:

16% of Oscar nominees all-time are people of color.

31% of Grammy winners all-time are people of color. That’s 3% Latino.

[isitfake]

TRUE: Tubman’s on the $20 but Jackson is staying on the back

This seems like it must be fake because it is so stupid-- but it is not. While the Treasury is indeed rolling out the new Harriet Tubman $20, it is also currently planning to leave Andrew Jackson on the back of the $20. Andrew Jackson, of course: an attempted genocide, also, a slaveowner. It will probably just be a picture of his statue on horseback in front of the White House, but really, why do we even have that statue?

If you are in any way concerned about “disrespect” to Andrew Jackson, noted slaver and murderer, let Is This Fake just add that Andrew Jackson absolutely hated banks and paper money, and would have undoubtedly despised this honor, which, honestly, has been the only reason Is This Fake has gotten any pleasure out of his stupid face on the money to date.

Jack Lew has made a big deal about how this can’t be rolled out until 2030 because of fraud prevention, which means the designs are not anywhere near finalized, which means: phone calls may have an effect.

You can contact the treasury by phone at [phone] during East Coast business hours. You can also write to them at:

Department of the Treasury

1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20220

...Is This Fake is cheating a little bit on the purpose of this blog, but Is This Fake does not want Is This Fake’s primary blog notifs to be totally destroyed if this post takes off.

[isitfake]

TRUE: No Irish Need Apply signs were once a major factor in American life.

 Whoa. Ok. Is It Fake doesn’t know what to say here. Is It Fake is ashamed to admit that Is It Fake not only believed the original contention in this case, but probably told people about it confidently and douchily in arguments.

Professor Richard Jensen wrote a famous article “debunking” the presence of No Irish Need Apply signs in America, saying that no such signs had ever existed, and furthermore that anti-Irish discrimination was not the force it had been painted in American historical memory.

This is completely bullshit. As high school student Rebecca Fried has demonstrated, No Irish Need Apply ads were completely real. Here is a link to a page with tens of them, as well as a thorough description of Jensen’s response, which Is It Fake feels is at best disingenuous.

Jensen confidently stated that there were no window signs; they’re attested. He claimed that very few newspaper ads existed with these words–hundreds if not thousands do. He claimed that there were no contemporary court cases over the words–there were at least two. He claimed no contemporary commentator ever mentioned such a sign with any specificity–addresses and professions were mentioned in the press. And everybody believed him.

Is It Fake has taken several morals from this story, but first and foremost among them is: it is often easier in the academy to trust that discrimination did not exist, than that it did. Even when the group is now politically privileged, and even when the evidence for it is actually overwhelming.

[isitfake]

FAKE: Joe Biden has not been wearing a cape and running through the halls to celebrate gay marriage.

Sorry you guys. Is It Fake is as broken up about this as you are. It is not true that “Joe is running through the halls with a rainbow flagged tied on like a cape high fiving everyone. #MarriageEquaility #LoveWins #SCOTUS”. Twitter user @JillBidenVeep, who broke this story, is tragically a parody account.

Here’s a cute picture of him hugging it out in the Oval Office after the ACA ruling yesterday, though.

[wordsnquotes]

Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (via wordsnquotes)

Not from Jane Eyre--nothing at all like this appears in the book. The oldest version of this quote I can find is from a Yahoo! Answer. Here's a quote about expressing emotion though:

 There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came, and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable.

[isitfake]

FAKE: GOPTeens is not a real Republican twitter account.

@GOPTeens, a twitter account delivering such gems as "#Teens: Is r-a-p #disrespectful?" and "Today's #TeenChallenge! Study for the REAL #finals -- #Obama's "Final" days as #President!", has been circulated on Tumblr with captions suggesting, to put it gently, that the Republicans have perhaps removed the necessity for parody.

Fortunately @GOPTeens is, as they say about the Onion, "literally unbelievable". The author is a comedian with the name Daniel Kibblesmith. I refuse to investigate whether that's the name his parents gave him, because I love it too much.

[isitfake]

REAL (mostly): Gif of dude flipping over a stack of gym mats and then shooting a bow and arrow is only special effects when the arrow appears, and is a clip of stuntman Aaron Joshua

salt4life posted a gif from this video labeled "my native black American friend, also going places". (Caption's because his previous post showed Stephen Izzi from earlier in the video and was labeled, "dis n---- going places", for which he got flack.)

If you watch the video above, you can see that the flipping is real. The arrow? Not so much-- consensus is that it's CGI.

Aaron Joshua's stuntreel is right here. The Harry Potter looking clips in that look to be from Auror's Tale, a fan film series for Harry Potter which didn't get off the ground, but you can check out the teaser here. He also did stunts for Jamie Foxx in Annie and some unspecified stunts in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, so keep an eye out for him there!

The other guys in this video are Stephen Izzi, Jim Ng and Jason Ng.

[isitfake]

FAKE: Charlotte Brontë (probably) did not base Jane Eyre on characters from Emma

The line is:

so Charlotte Bronte read Emma by Jane Austen and was really interested in this minor character named Jane Fairfax who was poor and would have been a governess had she not married well and then Bronte wrote her own novel exploring the plight of the poor governess who married this guy named Edward Fairfax Rochester in a novel called Jane Eyre and my point is don’t let anyone tell you shit about fanfiction.

Is It Fake feels slightly bad about this one, because the OP was quoting their professor and is heartily sick of hearing about it, so if you know the originator of this, do not kick this post their way. But yeah, no, it doesn't seem to be true.

Charlotte Brontë did not like Jane Austen one bit. This fascinating pair of posts suggests that her dislike of Austen stemmed not just from their profound difference in authorial ethos and style, but from the fact that Brontë had been introduced to Austen in the context of a male reviewer, George Lewes, who was outing Brontë as a woman casually, offhandedly, in the middle of it. It's a condescending piece that starts out feminist and rapidly gets into some real bullshit. Lewes claims that "only cultivated minds" can appreciate Austen, and magnanimously allows Jane Eyre's faults to pass because the authoress has lived a secluded life away from the hazards of the world. Brontë's hackles went right up at that and stayed up for the rest of her life.

We know that Brontë did read Emma because she described it like this:

Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death- this Miss Austen ignores; she no more, with her mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision sees the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman; if this is heresy- I cannot help it. 

But this letter-- indeed Brontë's reading of any Austen-- comes only after Lewes writes, and therefore after the publication of Jane Eyre. Jocelyn Harris argues that this was a ruse in "Jane Austen, Jane Fairfax, and Jane Eyre", an article Is It Fake has not been able to access in full, but suffice it to say that there doesn't appear to be any actual documentary evidence for this, whereas there's quite a bit to suggest that Brontë read Emma where and when she said she did, a couple of years after Lewes wrote.

So no: Is It Fake finds it unlikely that Jane Eyre was in any way influenced by Jane Fairfax. But Is It Fake also finds that you shouldn't let anyone tell you shit about fanfiction, or about how your novels are too imaginative and dude-like, for that matter. Just a suggestion.

[isitfake]

FAKE: Leonardo da Vinci did not write advice on how to deal with assassins at the table

The quote is:

If there is an assassination planned for the meal, then it is seemliest that the assassin should be seated next to he who is to become the subject of his craft...as this will cause less interruption to the conversation if the action of the event is confined to one small area...After the corpse (and bloodstains if any) are removed by the serving persons, it is customary for the assassin also to withdraw from the table as this presence may sometimes be disturbing to the digestions of the persons who now find themselves seated next to him, and to this end a good host will always have a fresh guest, who has waited without, ready to join the table at this juncture.

Unfortunately, it is fake.

It's from a piece in Lapham's Quarterly, presented with what I'm going to assume, charitably, is straight-faced aplomb, and which cites Leonardo's Kitchen Notebooks as its major source. Well, don't get me wrong. This book looks hilarious. But it was written by Jonathan Routh and his wife, who were parodists, and it's a joke.

(Lapham's Quarterly is basically a Kunstkamera; enjoy the things it displays, but be aware that a proportion of them are not true.)

Da Vinci's Kitchen appears to be the "real" version of this, if you want to know what Leonardo actually may have said about cooking-- this article gives a sample.

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This is going around labeled as the weapon Grigory Orlov commissioned for Catherine the Great, but it is fake. I mean, it's a real knife, but-- and my Russian is limited, so please correct me-- it appears to have been commissioned by the creator of the Museum of the History of Weapons. If you do speak Russian, there's a video of the guy who commissioned it talking about it here, and its listing at the museum here. It's called 'How the Cossacks took the harem.' I'm pretty sure it's a rape joke.

Catherine the Great was one of the most spectacular and powerful empresses in world history, and she and Orlov did give each other a number of ridiculous gifts-- for example, the Orlov Diamond, from him to her, as a "please start having sex with me again gift", and the Marble Palace, from her to him, as a "sorry I'm not really interested in having sex with you anymore" gift. But this wasn't one of them.

[isitfake]

REAL: "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" is actually mostly Donald Glover imitating Tracy Morgan.

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah is a fictional novelty song performed by Tracy Jordan, a character played by Tracy Morgan, in 30 Rock. This Wiki-style intro downplays the song's complete genius: it is the perfect mess. Donald Glover, one of the show's writers and better known as Troy from Community (Is It Fake is really making it sound like Is It Fake is a seventy year old writing for Time Magazine), plays Tracy's producer. A clip of the song was recorded for an episode sting; the rumor goes that Tracy Morgan wasn't available after wrap, so Donald Glover had to do an imitation of him for the extended song.

Well, it's not a rumor; it is true. And hilarious. Source here:

Speaking of friends of 30 Rock, we are going to see flashbacks to young Tracy Morgan with Donald Glover. That’s going to be amazing. Well, Donald started right out of college as a writer at 30 Rock. He was actually still, I believe, living in an NYU dorm. He was an RA, and he would work and go home to a dorm. [Snickers] And he was on the show once a million years ago at the last minute. We had cast some teenager, and then we got [on set] and the kid didn’t show up, and Donald filled in as a gay teenager in a high school graduation scene. Tracy said something like, “There you are obviously gay kid” and Donald improvised the line, “Who told?” And we also knew that Donald could sound like Tracy because we did an extended version of “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah,” and by the time we finished it, we were wrapped and didn’t have Tracy. So half of it is just Donald imitating Tracy. But yeah, he’s super busy performing at Coachella, so he’s coming in for a hot second to do this. We’re very lucky.

[isitfake]

This is circulating with the quote "When the Japanese repair broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.”

Short answer: the practice itself is real, but the quote is kind of deceptive (and slightly misphrased) and the vase is not Japanese. I'm tagging this one "it's complicated."

First off, the quote: it's from artist Barbara Bloom. It describes, sort of, a ceramic art form called kintsugi. Kintsugi actually uses lacquer with powdered gold; I'm not sure gold seams would actually hold together teaware very well. Here's a site with a lovely gallery of different kinds of kintsugi. Bloom's quote has been circulating at least since before 2006. It's silly and ethnocentric, of course, to say that "the Japanese" repair teaware this way; superglue is available to all. It's a beautiful art form, though, and it certainly does make the reassembled pieces more beautiful a great deal of the time.

The vase, however, is not from some nameless master of kintsugi from the 15th century. It's by contemporary Korean artist Yee Sookyung. And it's not a good illustration of the quote. She's not trying to replicate the actual history of the pieces she reassembles in such unusual ways:

“I took ceramic trash from a ceramic master who reproduces old Korean ceramics such as Joseon Baekja or Celadon.

After baking in a kiln by using the old method, ceramic masters break almost 70 percent of the porcelains that don’t reach up to their standards of masterpieces.

I put the broken bits and pieces of ceramic trash together one by one as if I’m putting together a jigsaw puzzle. And I cover the seams with 24 karat gold leaf. The result was uncanny and bumpy objects. Each broken piece operates as a self forming into an infinite proliferation toward as unexpected fabrication–fictitious loquacity and stuttering discards from standard conventional masterpieces.”

Here's the quote I'd circulate with it, if I was the one circulating;

Yee explains: “The master potter was trying to create the perfect piece each time, and he would discard even the ones with the slightest flaw. So I chose to create new forms from them, because perhaps, I don’t believe completely in that kind of perfection.

“To me, a piece of broken ceramic finds another piece, and they come to rely on one another. The cracks between them symbolise the wound. The work is a metaphor of the struggle of life that makes people more mature and beautiful as they overcome their sufferings.”