Jonah Lehrer

Ha

i couldn't really work out if this would be a big deal because how rigorous do the standards need to be for 'jonah lehrer's take on creativity', you already signed up for some bullshit

so what happened

He resigned from the New Yorker, apparently.

Because of this:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/107779/jonah-lehrers-deceptions

creativity ain't easy
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/06/jonah_lehrer_self_plagiarism_the_new_yorker_staffer_stopped_being_a_writer_and_became_an_idea_man_.html

Apparently he made up a bunch of stuff.

"Stop asking me to explain." -- Bob Dylan Jonah Lehrer

Dow no that's the old thing. There is a new controversy now.

Lehrer's publisher is halting shipments of print copies of "Imagine" and will stop selling the e-book editions immediately

o_O wtf is going on now??

He apparently completely fabricated at least one quote.

Aw man, I really enjoyed his How We Decide book.

oops can't access on my PC--what's the new scandal?

He fabricated quote(s) by Bob Dylan.

fabricated a Dylan quote, i see ... how reliable are the allegations?

Lehrer admitted to them.

waht.

Lehrer's publisher is halting shipments of print copies of "Imagine" and will stop selling the e-book editions immediately

holy shit that is going to cost them a mint

Pretty reliable if the publisher has stopped shipping the book.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/183298/jonah-lehrer-accused-of-fabricating-bob-dylan-quotes-in-imagine/

ya but if he admitted it and he's known to make stuff up...

crazy.

what a strange thing to make up, quotes from a really well-known movie. absolutely bizarre

“Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about Bob Dylan quotes in my book ‘Imagine,’ ” Mr. Lehrer said in a statement. “The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said.”

“The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.”

How does a book of this magnitude get published without the publisher's editorial checking all the quotes?

Watching Wire Season 5 a couple of weeks ago I was struck by how true to this kind of thing the newspaper sequences were.

least he didn't go as far (as we know so far) as good ol' character assassin Stephen Glass
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-552819.html

who got a book and movie out of his case too

he "got" a movie about his disgrace?

what a strange thing to make up, quotes from a really well-known movie. absolutely bizarre

totally. gotta be so many Dylan fans who can quote half of Don't Look Back by heart.

can't believe hitler got so many movies out of the whole holocaust thing

Bob Dylan is a plagiarist himself so maybe it was supposed to be meta

Didn't he alter at least some of those lines from the Confederate poet? The "Blowin' In The Wind" controversy ended when the supposed victim admitted he'd lied, according to snopes.com.

o rly??

it's all true, see all about it!

http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/original/mhWkacAhIWZqYsBHXt8DkaP5VbZ.jpg

such a good movie.

im just saying he didnt necc "get" anything out of a movie about his disgrace

You don't think he sold the rights to it? Didn't get his career back though. Broadside Magazine used to preview lyrics. This high school kid saw "Blowin' In The Wind," made up his own tune, and when the record came out and the song became famous, his friends said, "Oh man he ripped you off!" So he let them think that, he said later (also told 'em he'd written a fan letter, "Dear Bob, I wrote this inspired by you! What do you think of it?" Later, after Dylan stood Newsweek up for an interview, an intern mentioned this rumor, and Newsweek published it--as speculation, this is just what we've heard, folks. Good times.

"You don't think he sold the rights to it?"

Pretty sure he doesn't have the rights to it. Forbes printed the expose.

ya i think life rights kinda expire if you're a public figure

N-no Fig, I've got the source right here! (uh)

I guess a Vanity Fair piece is maybe what got optioned.

Either way I don't think Glass (or Lane or Kelly or whomever) get a dime from the movie.

well anyway: making up all this shit to "verify" Vernon Jordan as a letch etc, way worse than Lehrer is all I'm sayin--and his editors weren't exactly prompt on it

Oh totally. Stephen Glass was horrible. I didn't realize we were comparing them.

And the editors who let doubts slide or don't even let them register as doubts because they Want To Believe--dig those Leon W. quotes in my xpost link--

Also Judith Miller and Jayson Blair were awful too btw.

Repost from the New Yorker thread:

Such a waste. For one thing, there are existing quotes that would have done the job almost as well. For another, don't fuck with Dylanologists - they know everything. If you're going to lose one of the best jobs in journalism for making shit up go the full Blair/Glass. Use your - heh - imagination.

― Get wolves (DL), Monday, July 30, 2012 7:43 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do usually publishers factcheck books line by line in the US? Seems unlikely. In my experience, except where something is legally dubious the publisher trusts the author to get it right.

i just don't know how anyone in their right mind could ever think they could get away with that, ever

...but im not sure that its fair to blame that for lehrer, whose failures seemed dictated less by a pressure to blog (which at some point as a marquee name he was no longer under!) but by a kind of total misunderstanding of what the duties and obligations of a journalist are

i mean i never, ever, and would never, ever, reuse one of my paragraphs. thats not at all a common practice! and while yes its impt to examine and think about the systemic problems that lead to situations where writers treat their writing as a marketing tool for the far more lucrative speaking circuit, i dont want to let lehrer off the hook -- hes a 31-year-old columbia graduate rhodes scholar, not some poor put up college-student intern news-blogger. he made his choices, he committed a sin that the vast majority of us who grew up writing online learned, despite the lack of extensive networks of support and aid, and would never, ever commit. fuck this guy, i hope he never gets another word printed again.

should be "sins" -- its not like he just did one thing once, he did a number of things several times over

serious non-rhetorical question: how serious on the list of infractions is recycling?

yeah that seems almost defensible

i dunno, if the practice is as widespread as milton says it is than my sense is off, but id think its at least a probation/suspension level offense. it wasnt surprising that JL didnt get fired from the nyer over it, though otoh i wouldnt have been surprised if he *had* been fired

in my experience everyone from Harold Bloom to Christgau has lifted sentences or whole passages from shorter essays for use in longer works.

oh i mean i think on a sentence to sentence level its pretty common; and if i saw a paragraph from a blog post appear in a book i wouldnt think its bad. but copying several paragraphs, wholesale, from a blog post on one site to a blog post on another...

why isnt there just software that catches all this shit automatically idgi

Turnitin.com will catch a lot of it; I use it for my classes.

yeah but like why isnt it just built into these publishing platforms

it could even been active right in the backend of wordpress or w/e

your post contains plagiarism, would you like me to put some blockquotes in there, just an oversight on yr part im sure

hi max --

I'm a pretty great example of a poster who could use an editor to keep my own hyperbole / syntax in check. The fact that self-plagiarism has been made such a big deal of here was surprising to me and suggests that it's probably actively discouraged. Safer to leave it at this: because the action has shifted on-line publishing, to where fact-checking (and spell-checking) is less of a priority, and where the writers who succeed are the ones who can publish at a fantastically accelerated rate, you'll see more cases where people lose track of their sources. I don't want to sound like I'm at all sympathetic to Lehrer, this is a spectacular flameout, but... this does seem systemic

writing now means keeping seven browser windows open, and cutting and pasting bits into place that you think asterisk for later 'rewriting'.

meanwhile: the online divisions of news businesses expect their employees to come up with 1-2 stories a day, and they're lucky if they have an editor who knows anything about what they're doing, let alone a fact-checker.

this cuts straight to the heart of it, i think -- the pressure to constantly publish, to constantly come up with new ideas quickly, several times a week. the pressure is huge -- i know this pressure well. and lehrer was very eager to please.

also, crucially, he was in the business of "ideas" writing - the TED/aspen institute/etc lecture circuit, which is some distance away from the unglamorous world of what most of us do. the "ideas" beat is loftier and more given to neatly embroidered truths than the prosaic, shoe-leather, day-to-day business of journalism

its p funny and apt how lehrer was this really successful cute ted conference type dude who was just out there doin w/e tf he wanted and saw no problem w/it

someone should write a contrarian blog post abt how everything he did was all good and natural

its p interesting how these ideas conferences fit into the scheme of high level careerist journalist/thinkers - cause once you start getting those invites you can book corporate speaking gigs that dwarf yr writing income

yeah milton i agree with that. interestingly i think youll see that "losing track of sources" thing happen way more often w/ famous established high-profile writers like zakaria (or lehrer) where a lot of research (and maybe some of the writing!) is being done by assistants and the "author" of the piece is off giving ted talks or whatever. ime its much more difficult to lose track of your sources when youre the only person working on the piece, not that it couldnt or doesnt happen.

someone should write a contrarian blog post abt how everything he did was all good and natural

― lag∞n, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 1:38 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/215637745152962560

"someone should write a contrarian blog post abt how everything he did was all good and natural"

I feel like someone already did this (at least in regards to the Dylan thing.)

Interestingness hunter-gatherer obsessed with combinatorial creativity.

lmao some people

I think the idea of recycling your own work as a form of plagiarism is interesting, because it's something artists do all the time -- thinking of recurrent motifs and details in, say, Vonnegut stories, or rothko reworking the same color in different ways, or John Lee Hooker using essentially one groove to write 20 different songs. More prosaically, in daily beat journalism, if you're writing 30 stories over the course of two months about the same school budget fight, you are going to very quickly develop a boilerplate paragraph of background info that you can insert in every single story. I understand that's different than what Lehrer did, especially because he was using more or less the same work in different outlets, but it's a hazy line -- and one people are only really aware of now because it's so easy to search and compare lots of different pieces of writing at once.

the difference is imho journalists are not artists

he shouldve just learned how to use blockquotes in whatever cms he was on is m/l what it comes down to

i mean theres really no harm is saying 'i previously wrote' or 'some other guy wrote' or 'bob dylan really didnt exactly say'

yeah i dont think this is really a "hazy line"? 1 boilerplate background paragraph in a article filled with new information is miles away from 3 important thesis paragraphs in a blog post thats just retreading what you already wrote somewhere else

hes a 31-year-old columbia graduate rhodes scholar

fuck if there wasn't any other reason to know he's full of shit

>its much more difficult to lose track of your sources when youre the only person working on the piece

key point -- thanks

>the difference is imho journalists are not artists

this is the thing you'd hope would be kept clear. but digital workflow has already made a total mess of previously unquestioned boundries like 'artist' and 'curator' so it's not surprising it's also making a hash of 'artist' and 'journalist'

wired in particular has a tradition of evangelism rather than journalism baked into its DNA, but in a lot of ways I found the articles in wired more interesting and informative than the new yorker despite (or maybe because?) of it. new yorker and wired do feel like they are both converging in the last few years, and maybe the new yorker got the short end of this convergence?

(meaning general sloppiness)

Telling stories, whether for the purpose of entertainment or instruction, has always entailed a certain amount of selective framing and coloration of the facts. But when you attribute a quote to someone who really exists, you are supposed to quote them accurately. It is just good manners as well as good journalism.

That said, paraphrasing passed off as quotation probably happens a lot in journalism. It is easy to get away with because how many interviewees have an independent record of exactly what they said?

writing now means keeping seven browser windows open, and cutting and pasting bits into place that you think asterisk for later 'rewriting'.

― Milton Parker, Saturday, 1 September 2012 23:59 (3 days ago) Permalink

lol

^^ this was my MO as a journalist for a long time but I got so sick of it

Telling stories, whether for the purpose of entertainment or instruction, has always entailed a certain amount of selective framing and coloration of the facts. But when you attribute a quote to someone who really exists, you are supposed to quote them accurately. It is just good manners as well as good journalism.

Having done journalism in various forms for 20 years, I absolutely agree with this. But I have also wondered how somebody like, e.g., Joseph Mitchell would stand up to the current level of scrutiny. Some of his best stuff has pages and pages of apparently directly-quoted conversation, often from interviews or encounters he made years earlier.

That said, paraphrasing passed off as quotation probably happens a lot in journalism. It is easy to get away with because how many interviewees have an independent record of exactly what they said?

― Aimless, Tuesday, September 4, 2012 3:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya it happens constantly they say, thing is its easier to get away w/if you actually conduct the interview yrself

once in college i used the exact same paper in two different classes

am i a bad person

did one class give higher marks than the other?

a-minus on one, don't remember the other

the a-minus came with this comment from the professor, a novelist and poet of minor repute: 'the fact that you have very little to say is well-masked by how well you say it'

zing

the funny thing is i was not-so-subtly encouraged to more or less write the same paper as many times as i could in grad school.

Jonah who? Never heard of him.

And faceplant!

I e-mailed Lehrer first on his public Gmail address on the morning of June 19, before publishing a post on his repeated repurposing of his own work, and again on July 9 seeking further comment. He didn't respond either time.

Lehrer did apologize for the recycling to the New York Times on June 20. He was then quoted by Tablet on July 30, in a story about the fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine and, later, did an interview with Charles Seife, eventually published at Slate last month. Assuming no other reporters covering the story reached out to him, that makes Wallace the fifth person, not the third.

http://nymag.com/news/features/jonah-lehrer-2012-11/

i'm reading the jonah lehrer book right now -- there's no mention of the scandal in it that i can see yet. also has a cheery blurb from malcolm gladwell.

All of a sudden my twitter feed is full of this guy because he's muttering something at people somewhere.

Lovely:

Knight paid Jonah Lehrer $20K for speech.

context?

Yeah nice job there pal

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/06/07/jonah_lehrer_book_proposal_on_love_did_he_plagiarize_adam_gopnik.html

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/10/17/should/

God what a waste of space this guy is

Like it never enters his mind how to use his "talents" for anything other than pop psych trash that promotes his manufactured image as an insightful person. This is the kind of guy who, if he was your coworker, you would avoid like the plague and advise everyone else to do the same.