Don't Be April Fooled

Slate’s Jack Shafer offers an April Fool’s Day defense kit, saying, “This year, don’t be taken for a sucker by the media.”

I tend not to indulge in these things, but couldn’t resist back in 2000, just as the tech stock bubble was peaking. My friend Michael Schrage and I used my San Jose Mercury News column — in a double-bylined piece (which should have been an immediate tip that we were up to something) — to “reveal” that Stanford University was aiming for an initial public offering (IPO) of shares to the public.

I heard that day from a venture capitalist of some renown. I don’t have his email any longer, but he wrote to the effect that “You had me going just long enough to wonder if it was real.”