Some journalists who come to Vegas get it completely wrong. Others get it completely wrong ... on purpose. A Harper's snippet from an upcoming book about fact-checking, journalism and the allure of Las Vegas:

D’AGATA: The “rumor” about the Stratosphere kink is entirely anecdotal, which is why it’s called a “rumor.” I took my first trip to Las Vegas in the summer of 1994. On a bus tour I took from Las Vegas to Hoover Dam, we sat briefly in traffic at the foot of the tower, and the bus driver—who doubled as our tour guide—told us that one of the three legs on the tower’s tripod was crooked and that because the sight of it so unnerved local residents (even though it was supposedly safe), the building’s contractor filled in the leg’s crooked angle with Styrofoam.