I never did before Cornelia Fine! She did this appalling thing where she went back to the studies being cited in this one book about gender, and she’d be like, “So the author used Study X to support the conclusion that women are more empathetic than men. However, all of the participants in Study X were women.” And like that. It was scary.

Er, and thus, checking sources makes it easier for me to say: I can trust Sonia Shah reasonably much about historical events and legal proceedings, but not about medical stuff so much (thus maybe not that much about the science either).

Well, I guess I feel like approaching everything with a level of skepticism isn’t super useful to me, just because I have no way of really knowing whether the author is telling me the truth or making it up. I mean I have no way of aiming my skepticism correctly, apart from checking sources.

I dunno, maybe it was harder in 2006. But it can’t have been THAT much harder. The internet was around then.

Hahaha, yeah, me too. The more I read about the pharmaceutical industry the less I trust them. Did you see all that mess about Tamiflu recently? (It’s not the flu vaccine, it’s a treatment for flu once you have it.)

A lot of her sourcing was fine. Not all of it. It’s always trickier when you’re writing something that’s politicized — I mean, when it’s historical nonfiction, I’m just like, Yep, yep, these archival sources seem reasonable. When it’s a book like this, the author has to impress me a bit more.