I was absolutely shocked to find a New York Times Magazine article claiming the following: “To date, books and documentaries have done the best job of making the long zoom meaningful to mass audiences, starting with the Eames Brothers’ proto-long-zoom ‘Powers of Ten’ documentary of the 70’s…”

“The Eames Brothers”? It’s such a prominent error that I actually checked before writing this to make sure that Charles Eames didn’t do that famous film with some brother I had never heard of. Nope, he created “Powers of Ten” with his wife Ray, just like almost everything else he did in his long and illustrious career.

I’m not sure which is worse: that the author, Steven Johnson, thought the Eamses were brothers, or that nobody at the Times managed to catch the mistake before they went to press.

Update: The Times has corrected the article (same link as above), substituting “Charles and Ray Eames” for “the Eames Brothers.” It appears, though, that they do not update their corrections page in real time, but rather that the page mirrors whatever was published in the paper version for that particular day. It’s not a huge concern of mine, but I wonder if it might be better to include an unobtrusive reference to the correction on the article page, as Slate does. I should note that I’m impressed with the response from the Times and the author himself to my notes.