Marco Polo's stories are not regarded by scholars as authentic because in in his chronicles, he failed to mention tea, the Great Wall, the writing system, and other notable things about China at the time.
I'm surprised the New Yorker would use him as a reference.
Plus the book was actually laid down two decades later, by recounting memories to a jail mate who took note of it. Plus there were actually several retellings and rewritings of the book, so much that we're not even sure of the language it was first written in (French? Franco-Italian? Some Italian dialect?) So exaggeration, misremembering and lies are not only probable, but almost certain.
I'm surprised the New Yorker would use him as a reference.