Sleuths at the New Yorker Festival

Among the myriad offerings at last weekend's New Yorker Festival, one panel stood out for its what-the-heck-do-these-people-have-to-do-with-one-another quality: Sleuths, organized by David Grann, author of the wonderful Lost City of Z, and featuring biographer Stacy Schiff, ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, art historian Martin Kemp, and NYPD detective William Oldham. Grann brought them together to discuss the different ways in which they all practice detection and coax people and objects to reveal their secrets. As "fellow obsessives," Schiff's phrase, they've learned to push past commonly held beliefs, be persistent, ask questions, weigh sources, and constantly probe their own assumptions about what may or may not have happened. Sometimes the result saves lives or delivers justice, as in the work of Baer and Oldham, and sometimes it illuminates the past, as in the work of Kemp and Schiff. But taking the risk of being wrong, as detectives do, is advice worth heeding for thinkers of all kinds.
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