Hoodwinked?

Our latest column in The New York Times Magazine is a pretty unusual one. In the past, we’ve written about child car seats, dog poop, the price of sex, the economics of voting, and monkeys learning to use money. In this column, we revisited a story we told in Freakonomics. In the chapter called “How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real Estate Agents,” we talk about how a man named Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940’s and upended the Klan’s information asymmetry. Well, it has since been brought to our attention that Kennedy’s autobiography, The Klan Unmasked, has some veracity issues. As is customary with our Times columns, we have also put together a web page with additional information. For those of you inclined to post comments on this blog, remember that it’s worthwhile to read the actual article in addition to the supplemental materials; oftentimes, questions posed here in the comments section are answered in the actual article.