Lad mag Maxim is more of a guilty pleasure than a go-to on what's what, but they still raised a kerfuffle recently when they ran a review of an album they couldn't possibly have listened to. And it's a perfect specimen of BS in journalism.

But wait, have I committed the same sin? In the current issue of Psychology Today I profile Teller, the silent half of magician duo Penn & Teller. He co-directed a production of Macbeth full of gags and gore, and I wrote that it was "humorous and horrifying"--without having seen it.

Ah, but I have three excuses.

First, French literature professor Pierre Bayard argues in his cute and thoughtful volume How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read that "criticism attains its ideal form when it no longer has any relation with a work" (p.175--yes, I read the book, mostly.) The idea is that criticism is an art in itself that should use a work merely as a launching point to go on to talk about oneself: "what is essential is to speak about ourselves and not about books, or to speak about ourselves by way of books." If we are fully pulled into the world of another artist, we lose touch with our own. Ok, it's a provocative sentiment but not fully convincing. Much of How to Talk is about using whatever scraps of knowledge about a book, its author, its genre, etc. from, say, listening to conversations about it, and creating your own version of that book in your head by filling in the blanks. Here, I pictured the Macbeth production after reading about it and asking Teller about it. For example, he told me, "We really are going for some genuine scares. Our Weird Sisters are going to be the most frightening that have ever trodden the board, and probably the funniest." "Humorous and horrifying" didn't seem off-base. Similarly, you might expect that the Black Crowes review in Maxim was pretty well-reasoned based purely on previous albums. "Boozy, competent"? Sure, I'll buy that. (Not literally.)

Second--and here's where Maxim and I start to diverge--my description was not in a magazine's reviews section. As sociologist Harry Collins told me, "BS is when you get a difference in people's expectations of what the appropriate warrant is for making a claim." Most people would agree that to achieve warrant to give an album some number of stars one must listen to it; the Maxim editors had a different idea. On the other hard, few readers would feel betrayed to learn that I had not based my two words on the viewing of the actual play.

Finally, and most importantly, I actually did see the production. After writing those words I made sure to go see it in New Jersey with enough time to revise them before they hit the newsstands. And no, there was no reason to stop the presses.