Late last night The Atlantic attached an editor's note to its story on niche sports, saying that author Ruth Shalit Barrett "deceived" the magazine about the central person in the narrative, a woman ID'd as "Sloane": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-lacrosse-niche-sports-ivy-league-admissions/616474/

This editor's note is nearly 800 words long, and the wildest sentence is this one.

And it contains an admirable mea culpa from the Atlantic about the way it identified the author, "Ruth S. Barrett," in the original piece:

I have written two pieces on this episode, one about the reemergence of Ruth Shalit Barrett: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/24/ruth-shalit-just-wrote-atlantic-would-readers-know-it-byline/ And another about a number of problems with the story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/30/atlantics-troubled-niche-sports-story/

There's still a lot in there to correct, imo. The distortions and nonsense in the piece all lean in one direction -- toward making the parents of Fairfield Co. appear more unreasonable and tyrannical and status-conscious than they are.

The Atlantic will have to decide whether it can stand behind the story given that reality.