Literary Indignation, Post #2

This is about to get meta…

“At the time, it felt like a very sad discovery, that I still so wanted to write,” Mr. Lehrer said during a recent interview in an empty conference room at his publisher’s office in Midtown Manhattan. “After everything happened, I thought I was done as a writer.”

Is he reading my thoughts…?

“He didn’t seem to get the ethos of journalism,” said Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University who conducted an investigation into Mr. Lehrer’s work for Wired in 2012. “The deficits were so profound in the first round that I can’t imagine him starting afresh.”

Maybe he was never a journalist…?

“I don’t believe in destroying a person’s life forever…”

Bold stance. How magnanimous.

“He’s had his public humiliation, and from the evidence of this book, a chastened Jonah Lehrer has a lot to offer the world,” the New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks wrote in a forthcoming review for The Times Book Review. “The book is interesting on nearly every page.”

“Yeah… so… Mr. Brooks… about that blurb you wrote for the book…”

“I regret the kind of writer I’d become,” said Mr. Lehrer, a California native who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two young children. “I was invested in the superficial markers of success, and I wasn’t focused on making the work as good and true as possible.”

First of all… come on. Are we really going to have a “think of the children!” moment?

Anyway, that’s such a great argument. “Before I was just focused on the markers of success so I wanted to write a NYT best-seller to prove all of that wrong!”

“That writing became self-help in the literal sense, writing to understand myself,” he said.

It’s called a journal. A private journal. That’s what that is called.

(Mr. Lehrer said he used his “raw personal experience” to frame the ideas in the book, but felt he wasn’t very good at writing memoir.)

Don’t be so hard on yourself! You were great at writing a memoir! That’s what all that other stuff was!

Wait, you thought it was science? Oh.

Also, what is a non-raw personal experience?

Mr. Lehrer said one motivation for writing the book was that he wanted to be able to show his children that he had learned from his mistakes, and changed.

SCENE: Family gathered around a dining table on a bright Sunday morning

LEHRER, wearing a navy cardigan: “Daddy got in trouble for fudging some pseudo-science on a bunch of articles and books. But I’m changed now, right?”

CHILD LEHRER #1: “Orange juice, please.”

“I wanted to say, I did something terrible, I broke the most basic rules of my profession, but I learned a lot from it and I wrote one more book.”

What?

In an article for Slate, Daniel Engber combed through a leaked copy of Mr. Lehrer’s book proposal and pointed to evidence of improperly cited material. (Mr. Engber was unimpressed by Mr. Lehrer’s new work, and wrote, “Lehrer may have given up on outright fraud, but he’s still prone to spreading bunk.”)

Damn you Engber. Leave some for the rest of us.

“This is a talented writer, who I think has apologized profusely for what he did,” he said. “Is he just supposed to walk away from his calling?”

TOWNSPEOPLE (screaming): YES

Robert Krulwich, the co-host of Radiolab, on WNYC, who has known Mr. Lehrer for about 15 years, said he supported Mr. Lehrer’s decision to return to writing.

“I said to him, you have things to say, and you have the talent to say them,” he said. “But if you want to do this for some more of your life, then you’re going to have to pay the price, and you can’t ever let this happen again, ever.”

What was I supposed to take away from this article? Everyone is allowed repeated, blatant plagiarism (and just making up stuff!)… and then after a brief period you can proceed consequence-free, as long as you don’t blatantly plagiarize or make stuff up again?