Our contributing editor, Joseph Epstein, writes: “I should like to apologize for an error in simple arithmetic in my Casual, ‘The Running of the Bulls,’ in last week’s issue. I mentioned four season tickets to the Chicago Bulls costing $ 325 each per game, and went on to write that the expense of this was ‘$ 1,000 a game, and since the team plays forty-odd games at home . . . well, you do the math.’ I hope you didn’t actually do the math, but I am confident you would have done it better than I did. Four times $ 325 equals not $ 1,000, but $ 1,300. We have all heard of the two cultures — scientific and literary, with each supposed to be ignorant of the other but making this mistake is ridiculous, and very embarrassing.”
For good measure, John Podhoretz made a stupid literary mistake in his piece on Shakespeare and film two weeks ago (as he realized to his chagrin driving home after the issue had been sent to the printer). He claimed that the scene in Macbeth in which Birnam Wood moves by itself to Dunsinane was a supernatural occurrence when, in fact, it was only an advancing army hiding behind the boughs of trees in the forest. Podhoretz wishes he could claim it was only a math error, like Epstein’s, but no such luck.
