Three or four days each week, we run one of Cecil’s old columns, called “classic.”
These are run for amusement and a sense of history, but are not generally revised to reflect the time lapse. So, sometimes they contain a statement that is now outdated. We’re happy to get comments about that, and updates; feel free to post such here.
On the other hand, sometimes they contain a statement that makes Cecil seem prescient, or prophetic, knowing in 1983 about something that would happen in 1992. It’s no such thing, it’s just that there has been some editing since the original column appeared. There is editing when a column is revised to appear in a book, there can be some editing when something is posted as classic, whatever. So, basically, if you think that Cecil appears to know the future (based on column date), the answer is no, but at some later point, one of the editors knew the past. So, if you’ve posted something like, “Hey, in a column dated 1987, how does Cecil know about the Bush-Gore election fo 2000?”… the answer is, “He didn’t, someone later did.”