Why Did Jonah Lehrer Plagiarize Himself? - Slate

Josh Levin

On Tuesday morning, media watcher Jim Romenesko caught Jonah Lehrer stealing. The victim: Jonah Lehrer. The newly minted New Yorker staff writer’s June 12 blog post “Why Smart People Are Stupid” copied, at times word for word, three paragraphs from Lehrer’s 2011 Wall Street Journal story “The Science of Irrationality.” A few hours later, New York’s Joe Coscarelli and writer Jacob Silverman discovered a bunch more instances in which Lehrer reheated his leftovers. The New Yorker has now appended editors’ notes to all five posts on Lehrer’s new blog Frontal Cortex and to an additional post he wrote about Steve Jobs in 2011. Those notes acknowledge that “paragraphs,” “portions,” or “details” originally appeared in writing that Lehrer had done elsewhere.>>>