Plagiarists of the World, Unite!
Gawker catches Newsweek plagiarizing from Slate...while the Crimson catches sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarizing from novelist Megan McCafferty...while the Times nabs Raytheon CEO William Swanson plagiarizing from a 1944 book, "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering," by W.J. King.
What is it with you people?
My thoughts....
Plagiarism is never the original sin, it's the symptom of some deeper dysfunction.
The Newsweek writers were probably so bored with the banal pseudo-sociological nonsense that they were writing about Duke lacrosse—I mean, just look at what they stole—that they couldn't trouble themselves to muster any original thoughts.
The Harvard student absorbed what may be Harvard's ascendant philosophy, if I may paraphrase—achievement without a soul. (She wants to go into investment banking. Shocker.)
The Raytheon chief surely had his "laws" of leadership written by a ghostwriter, who likely thought that the whole enterprise was so corrupt in the first place—he's writing "principles" to be spouted by a war profiteer— what's a little plagiarism in the mix?
One related example: Donald Trump allegedly wrote the foreword for a beauty book featuring the Miss USA contestants (Trump sponsors the pageant). When he threw a book party, he buried the author's name on the invitation, and when her father introduced himself to Trump as the father of the author, the sleazebag developer looked at him blankly, then said, "Oh, right. The author. Congrats."
Oh, right. The author.
