THE BOTTOM STORY OF THE YEAR IS FRAUDULENT.

It's a story I characterized as the desperation of late stage meritocracy, and it involved the people with a lot of money but not necessarily the grit going to extremes to get their spawn onto Ivy league country club sports teams.  The article ran in Atlantic, which tells you a lot already.  Read it again today, and there's a disclaimer before you get to the story.

On October 22, we noted and corrected another error in the story: The article originally referenced Olympic-size backyard hockey rinks, but although the private rinks are large and equipped with floodlights and generators, they are not Olympic-size.

We are also updating Barrett’s byline. Originally, we referred to her as Ruth S. Barrett. When writing recently for other magazines, Barrett was identified by her full name, Ruth Shalit Barrett. (Barrett is her married name.) In 1999, when she was known by Ruth Shalit, she left The New Republic, where she was an associate editor, after plagiarism and inaccurate reporting were discovered in her work. We typically defer to authors on how their byline appears—some authors use middle initials, for example, or shorter versions of their given name. We referred to Barrett as Ruth S. Barrett at her request, but in the interest of transparency, we should have included the name that she used as her byline in the 1990s, when the plagiarism incidents occurred. We have changed the byline on this article to Ruth Shalit Barrett.

We decided to assign Barrett this freelance story in part because more than two decades separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic and because in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines. We took into consideration the argument that Barrett deserved a second chance to write feature stories such as this one. We were wrong to make this assignment, however. It reflects poor judgment on our part, and we regret our decision.

Do the backyard hockey rinks really have that much of an effect as long as you get scrappy kids in Hibbing or Parry Sound or Elmhurst somehow making do on the local pond or at the Y or a city park?

Power Line's Steven Hayward asks the right questions.

Lots to be said here, but why do the mainstream media outlets continue to fall for serial fabricators and corner-cutters like Shalit-Barrett? Why do writers like Shalit-Barrett think they can continue to make stuff up to advance a preferred story line?

For the same reason that serial fabulist Joseph Biden is running for president?