Riddled with Irony

     Jonah Lehrer's fifteen minutes of fame ended worse than most. Once a noteworthy sci-tech blogger, Lehrer committed the deadly sin of plagiarism--numerous times. Despite holding a reputable position at the New Yorker magazine, Lehrer was rightly accused of recycing his own work, mis-attributing quotes, and more. His book "Imagine: How Creativity Works" and his work on Wired.com led to his job offer from the New Yorker in June of 2012. Within the same summer, Lehrer resigned (Coscarelli).

     Faced with a mountain of evidence against his ethos, Lehrer was booted from a lecture series at Indiana’s Earlham College. Ironically, the series' funding came from the "Robert Simpson Charles Lectureship in Ethics Endowed Fund." Lehrer's lack of journalistic ethics disqualified him from giving a speech in a lecture series dedicated to promoting ethics. How can this single event be even more ironic, you ask? His speech was to be titled, "Imagine: How Creativity Works" (Bercovici).

     After word spread of Lehrer's soiled name, the organization at which he gained his initial (pre-accusation) fame, Wired.com, began appending Lehrer's articles with editor's notes: "Editor's Note: Some work by this author has been found to fall outside our Editorial standards. Not all posts have been checked. If you have any comments about this post, please write to research@wired.com." All this for a formerly famed journalist whose notable works include, "Why Smart People Are Stupid," "Why We Don’t Believe In Science," "The Science of Irrationality," and more science-related blog titles that were just too easy to copy-and-paste into my own blog post as satirical puns. In his Jan. 11, 2011 blog entry on Wired.com, "Cognitive Dissonance," Lehrer rips into Dr. Andrew Wakefield for writing a fraudulent medical paper on the effects of vaccinations on children. While Wakefield's study is indeed fraudulent and irresponsible to say the least, I need not explain what about this is coincidentally unfortunate for Lehrer who would soon lose any semblance of credibility.

     The 1997 Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) details two hypothetical instances of plagiarism to which Lehrer's failings would later apply: "[t]he confusion/misuse could be seen in the nature of the work, whether it is factual but passed off as creative, or vice versa," and "[t]he confusion/misuse could be seen in the amount and substantiality of the text used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" (Galin). Despite the fact that Lehrer most often plagiarized himself, the rules remain equally applicable. In one of the more extensive, obvious guffaws by Lehrer, "The Cost of Creativity" (might I add, you really can't make up how applicably ironic these titles are), he copies and pastes his own lines from "A Physicist Solves the City," published just over a year prior via another outlet.

     It would be negligent for me to not share the summarizing sentence of Joe Coscarelli's article for the New York magazine, given how fittingly it is transcribed from Lehrer's writing: "The Wired article is called "The Cost of Creativity," and in the introduction Lehrer writes, 'After spending years with the same ideas and sentences — they become old friends — it’s invigorating to see how people react, to keep track of which concepts spark their curiosity'" (Coscarelli). (It would be ironic on an entirely new level for me to include that quotation without proper attribution.)

     The fact is, replicated items are always devalued and considered cheaper. Too much of Lehrer's writings are duplicated from his own previous works, not to mention his numerous other plagiarism issues. Whether or not he was simply overwhelmed with new-found fame and pressure, it is important to note the errors made by a once-promising sci-tech blogger and learn from them for future generations or writers in all spheres.

 
Works Cited:

Bercovici, Jeff. Jonah Lehrer Was Going To Give A Speech On Ethics. It's Canceled, Obviously. 8.1.12. Forbes.

Coscarelli, Joe. New Yorker Writer Jonah Lehrer Plagiarizes Himself Repeatedly. 6.19.12. New York magazine.

Galin, Jeffery. The Fair Use Battle for Scholarly Works. 1997. The Fair Use Battle.