Pictures of the Day: Brazil and Elsewhere

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Photos from Brazil, Syria, Afghanistan and India.

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More on the Plane That Didn’t Crash, and ‘Truthiness’

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the plane that didn’t crash - that is, about a Lives piece in The Times Magazine that has drawn significant criticism from aviation experts including Patrick (“Ask the Pilot”) Smith and from James Fallows, a well-known journalist who writes for The Atlantic.

The magazine article, written in memoir style by the contributor Noah Gallagher Shannon, contains a number of assertions that these critics justifiably say are either murky or apparently false.

Mr. Fallows summarized the problems this way: “The most consequential discrepancies were maintenance records showing that the plane never had any real or suspected landing-gear problems, though a landing-gear failure was the main narrative premise of the piece; and that its entire flight time from takeoff in Washington to unexpected landing in Philadelphia was 42 minutes, versus the tense two hours of circling over Philadelphia to burn off fuel described in the article.”

Mr. Fallows last week interviewed the author, who is not a Times staff member. Mr. Gallagher agreed that he should have been more careful and he apologized to both The Times and its readers:

I guess the last month has instilled in me a greater need for careful scrutiny of my own work. It was driven home to me that it was wrong to give the impression of certainty, of fact, and the things I was a little uncertain or hazy on, I should have qualified those observations, and I think that would have been the better journalistic thing to do â€" or done more background research. But I didn’t at the time, and I have to apologize to the readers and The New York Times for that, and I take full responsibility.

The Times has continued to look into the accuracy of the article, even after publishing a blog post from Hugo Lindgren, the magazine editor. That post defended the piece on the grounds that it represented the author’s feelings and his memories accurately, which was its purpose.

I still feel the same way about the magazine article. As readable as it was, it wasn’t fully accurate in the way that Times journalism is expected to be.

A reader, Frank Spencer-Molloy, wrote to me about it this week, expressing his thoughts in strongly worded terms:

I hope you will find time to follow up on the now-ironclad case made by James Fallows and other aviation experts that a personal essay appearing in The New York Times Magazine recently was so factually flawed that it should have never been published. That case was cinched this weekend by the author’s admission that the premise of the article - and many incidental factual assertions - was wrong.

Hugo Lindgren’s dismissive reply to Fallows that the piece’s recitation of factual accuracies was secondary to the author’s subjective experience was insulting. Absolution by reason of truthiness covers a multitude of sins.

Readers, he concludes, had the feeling that they “were blown off.”

I understand his concern. The Times needs to stand for truth, not truthiness - yes, even in a memoir-style feature article in the magazine.

However, I disagree that Times editors have dismissed these concerns. I know that over the past several weeks they have been rechecking the article’s facts and talking repeatedly to the author.

I have reason to believe that in the next day or so, Mr. Lindgren may amplify his current note to readers. I’ll update this post if that comes about.

It would be a good move â€" as would linking to that blog post from the online version of the original article, which is not the case now. A straight-up acknowledgement of the factual problems of this article is the only way out of this.

Exotic Explorers Venture From the Archive

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“Slowly, rope length by rope length, we progressed. The declining sun flamed and died around us, a vivid furnace with bars of scarlet spread behind Mount Everest, and the tropic night dashed upon us.” So began an article on the front page of The New York Times in 1930, datelined Jonsong Base Camp. And if time and technology have made the Himalayas more accessible geographically, much else about this dispatch â€" the breathless prose, the heraldic portraiture â€" seems more distant and mysterious with each passing year.

The world was a big place once, an open challenge to teams of explorers, and when adventure seekers set out to explore its remote spots, The Times enlisted their talents as writers, photographers and sources of heart-pounding vicarious thrills.

To these, The Times being The Times, the staff added a touch of the paper’s own indigenous culture. Often, this surfaced in notes affixed to the backs of the photographs.

“Mr. Wood Johnson photographed wearing the high climbing equipment,” reads a note on the back of the Jonsong photograph (Slide 8). “Under the climbing suit will be worn woolen combinations, probably two pairs and a flannel shirt. Over these, thin Shetland pullovers, as it has been proved that two or three thin layers of light wool such as hand knitted Shetland are better than one thick layer.”

Or, on the back of a photo from a 1931 Arctic expedition led by the Rev. Bernard R. Hubbard, a scientist and explorer nicknamed the Glacier Priest: “A flapper of the north. A modern Tenah belle sporting what the well-dressed young lady of the northern regions will wear” (Slide 6).

Oh, the thrill of it all â€" of exertion and discovery, undertaken solely for the purpose of exertion and discovery and relayed in the black-and-white pantomime of photography and lead type! Don’t you miss it?

Carpenter Greenland Expedition Eskimo girls in Greenland. Nov. 4, 1934.

“GREAT ADVENTURES STILL LEFT FOR MAN,” declared a boldly capitalized headline from April 16, 1933. “In Spaces Between the Worlds, in Ocean Depths and at Earth’s Core Are Held the Challenging Mysteries.”

The photographs here hail mainly from the 1920s and 1930s, when explorers tested the limits of human endurance to see how much of the world they could bring home.

The articles stressed exoticism â€" the difficulty of the journey, the unfamiliarity of the people and their cultures. The photographs, by contrast, cut the world down to size, posing the Eskimo girls of Greenland (above) or the Queen Mother of Swaziland (Slide 14) in formal portraits no more foreign than “American Gothic.” If the subjects were wholly new to most American readers, the framing was as familiar as home.

Still, the domesticated portraits do nothing to hide the daredevilry of the photographers here, like George Miller Dyott (Slide 15), a British explorer who led an Amazon expedition in 1926 and wrote about it in The Times. As the group carried their canoes around one precipitous stretch of whitewater, they found an arrow planted in their path. “I scanned the rapids lapping the rocks with white tongues of foam,” Mr. Dyott wrote. “I wondered which was the better alternative: a five-foot arrow through one’s stomach or the cold embrace of the hungry water.”

He chose the water and lived to tell the tale â€" in words and pictures, from the River of Doubt, now flowing gently through the Lively Morgue.

The New York Times William Beebe in The New York Times’s photo studio. Undated.

Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. The Lively Morgue is also on Tumblr, and Lens is on Facebook.

Exotic Explorers Venture From the Archive

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

“Slowly, rope length by rope length, we progressed. The declining sun flamed and died around us, a vivid furnace with bars of scarlet spread behind Mount Everest, and the tropic night dashed upon us.” So began an article on the front page of The New York Times in 1930, datelined Jonsong Base Camp. And if time and technology have made the Himalayas more accessible geographically, much else about this dispatch â€" the breathless prose, the heraldic portraiture â€" seems more distant and mysterious with each passing year.

The world was a big place once, an open challenge to teams of explorers, and when adventure seekers set out to explore its remote spots, The Times enlisted their talents as writers, photographers and sources of heart-pounding vicarious thrills.

To these, The Times being The Times, the staff added a touch of the paper’s own indigenous culture. Often, this surfaced in notes affixed to the backs of the photographs.

“Mr. Wood Johnson photographed wearing the high climbing equipment,” reads a note on the back of the Jonsong photograph (Slide 8). “Under the climbing suit will be worn woolen combinations, probably two pairs and a flannel shirt. Over these, thin Shetland pullovers, as it has been proved that two or three thin layers of light wool such as hand knitted Shetland are better than one thick layer.”

Or, on the back of a photo from a 1931 Arctic expedition led by the Rev. Bernard R. Hubbard, a scientist and explorer nicknamed the Glacier Priest: “A flapper of the north. A modern Tenah belle sporting what the well-dressed young lady of the northern regions will wear” (Slide 6).

Oh, the thrill of it all â€" of exertion and discovery, undertaken solely for the purpose of exertion and discovery and relayed in the black-and-white pantomime of photography and lead type! Don’t you miss it?

Carpenter Greenland Expedition Eskimo girls in Greenland. Nov. 4, 1934.

“GREAT ADVENTURES STILL LEFT FOR MAN,” declared a boldly capitalized headline from April 16, 1933. “In Spaces Between the Worlds, in Ocean Depths and at Earth’s Core Are Held the Challenging Mysteries.”

The photographs here hail mainly from the 1920s and 1930s, when explorers tested the limits of human endurance to see how much of the world they could bring home.

The articles stressed exoticism â€" the difficulty of the journey, the unfamiliarity of the people and their cultures. The photographs, by contrast, cut the world down to size, posing the Eskimo girls of Greenland (above) or the Queen Mother of Swaziland (Slide 14) in formal portraits no more foreign than “American Gothic.” If the subjects were wholly new to most American readers, the framing was as familiar as home.

Still, the domesticated portraits do nothing to hide the daredevilry of the photographers here, like George Miller Dyott (Slide 15), a British explorer who led an Amazon expedition in 1926 and wrote about it in The Times. As the group carried their canoes around one precipitous stretch of whitewater, they found an arrow planted in their path. “I scanned the rapids lapping the rocks with white tongues of foam,” Mr. Dyott wrote. “I wondered which was the better alternative: a five-foot arrow through one’s stomach or the cold embrace of the hungry water.”

He chose the water and lived to tell the tale â€" in words and pictures, from the River of Doubt, now flowing gently through the Lively Morgue.

The New York Times William Beebe in The New York Times’s photo studio. Undated.

Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. The Lively Morgue is also on Tumblr, and Lens is on Facebook.