Interesting watching the Jonah Lehrer kerfuffle play out from my perspective. 1st takeaway: journalism is dripping with schadenfreude.
— Mike Daisey (@mdaisey) June 21, 2012
Jonah Lehrer, a friend of the Dish, got caught recycling pieces of his own writing. Jack Shafer ponders the transgression:
In the early hours of l’affaire Lehrer, my instincts were telling me that Lehrer had transgressed, but I couldn’t figure out whether his offense was a felony, a misdemeanor or a violation of journalistic taboo. A variety of observers were calling what Lehrer did “self-plagiarism,” but in my mind plagiarism requires some act of thievery. You can’t steal money out of your own bank account, can you? You can’t commit adultery with your own spouse, right?
Shafer eventually concludes that Lehrer "cheated his new publishers by breaking the implied (or written) contract that he was producing original copy." Josh Levin sees all this as proof that Lehrer is running on empty:
[B]logging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired. For Lehrer and TheNew Yorker, the best prescription is to shut down Frontal Cortex and give him some time to come up with some fresh ideas. The man’s brain clearly needs a break.
Felix Salmon counters:
While I’m sympathetic to Levin’s point here, I think his prescription is entirely wrong. The problem with Jonah Lehrer, like the problem with Zach Kouwe, is not that he was humbled by the insatiable demands of Blog. Instead, it’s that he made a category error, and tried to use a regular blog as a vehicle for the kind of writing that should not be done in blog format. Lehrer shouldn’t shut down Frontal Cortex; he should simply change it to become a real blog. And if he does that, he’s likely to find that blogs in fact are wonderful tools for generating ideas, rather than being places where your precious store of ideas gets used up in record-quick time.
Yep: the readers long ago became an engine for new thought on the Dish. Try having 270 opinions every week on hundreds of different topics and getting any of them right.
(Context for the chutzpah-filled tweet here.)
The Dish 