Most of the old articles that The Atlantic Monthly posts on its Web site (as Flashbacks, Related Articles, etc.) have to be converted from hard copy to digital format with the use of a scanner. The article gets placed face down on the scanner, and the computer "reads" the text, converting it to a digitized document. Scanning software has yet to be perfected, however, so the computer sometimes makes some interesting mistakes.

Some Scanning Errors:

"...psychiatry is making drag addicts out of America's school children..." [drug]
Kohn article "Suffer the Restless Children"

"...gravity of the threat posed by the Soviet onion..." [Union]
(Jack Beatty's "Exorbitant Anachronism" article)

"...Center for the Study of American lousiness..." [Business]
Easterbrook article on Think Tanks ("Ideas Move Nations")

"The New York Slimes" [Times]

"The Los Angeles Emus" [Times]

"...the religious belief that our fellow passengers on spaceship earth have a right to exit..." [exist]
(The Butterfly Problem)

"...Steinbeck's Canapes of Wrath..."
(Fallow's "America's Changing Economic Landscape" article)

"'Thigh technology is the cornerstone of our defense,' he says...." [High]
(John Clarke's 1993 article criticizing contemporary U.S. foreign policy)

"he was such a powerful figure in the blouse" [House]
(Merrill Peterson's 1992 article about Thomas Jefferson)

"As we gaped, a mist pooped on us and all was suddenly veiled by the whirling confetti of a gentle snowstorm." [swooped]
(Jonathan Skow's article on Mt. climbing)

"Fifteen years ago, the neoconservative movement's defining publication was The Pelvis Interest, known for its skeptical, detailed articles about government programs." [Public]
(Lemann's "Politics of Immobility" article)

"Isolationism has always been most interested in the foreign countries that have already been lost to the enemas." [enemies]
(from one of the Election Connection Foreign Policy Articles)

"For example the threatened teamsters' strike in Boston in 1906, which had passed entirely beyond the control of the hamsters' own representatives..." [teamsters']
("The Personal Factor in the Labor Problem")

"...I have long suspected a particular culprit--a culprit that can undermine black achievement as effectively as a lock on a schoolhouse door. The culprit I see is shampoo..." [stigma]
(Race and the Schooling of Black Americans by Claude M. Steele)

Weirdest Assertion by an Atlantic Contributor (strangely enough, this cannot be accounted for by any scanning error):

"I give birth mainly to guinea-pigs in the shape of postcards."
--William James, "Familiar Letters of William James III (September, 1920) [original letter was addressed to Josiah Royce in 1900]"

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