Shots in the Dark

When I was a boy, I was almost carried out to sea by a dolphin. (This is, in fact, largely true.) At the time, I was quite okay with it as long as the dolphin eventually returned me to the shore, which it did. There was some mild hubbub, and then things went on as normal.

But the experience made me a great fan of dolphins, and I am delighted that, for the most part, people tend to feel the same way, and generally disapprove of their pointless killing. (The poor sharks—they can not smile.) And so they are not killed nearly as much as they used to be.

Which is a long way of saying that anyone who can watch this video and not find it wonderful and awe-inspiring and humbling at the same time really needs to conduct a soul check. Because this is magic. (Not sure about the soundtrack music, though.)

These are Pacific white-sided dolphins filmed about 20 miles off Santa Cruz, CA, by a guy named Mark Peters who, as far as I can tell, was just a fisherman with a knack for technology. I found it on Pete Thomas Outdoors. If you’re in a hurry, fast-forward to 1:35.

Update: Mother Nature News suggests that the video may be a fake. That would be irritating.

“Hi!

Attached please find a media alert for Tatiana Byron, available for commentary on Jennifer Aniston’s engagement.”

(Ms. Bryon is apparently an event planner who has worked with, among others, Joan Rivers.)

Also included: a thought-provoking exegesis of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Washington Post reports that Fareed Zakaria has used quotes without attribution that were previously reported and published by other writers.

Columnist and TV host Fareed Zakaria, who acknowledged plagiarizing parts of a magazine article last week, appears to have also published without attribution a passage from a 2005 book.

Zakaria used a quote from Intel chair Andy Grove which came from a book by Clyde Prestowitz, who interviewed Grove. Prestowitz complained about the lifting at the time of publication, but Zakaria never responded to him.

Zakaria strongly defends himself with this rationale:

Zakaria, in an interview Monday, defended the practice of not attributing quotes in a popular book. “As I write explicitly [in the book], this is not an academic work where everything has to be acknowledged and footnoted,” his said. The book contains “hundreds” of comments and quotes that aren’t attributed because doing so, in context, would “interrupt the flow for the reader,” he said.

He compared his technique to other popular non-fiction authors. “Please look at other books in this genre and you will notice that I’m following standard practice,” he said.

Okay, now that pisses me off.

For two reasons.

One, this is not standard practice. Standard practice is, It’s okay to use without attribution a quote that has become part of popular culture. You could say, for example, “As Rodney King once said, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?'” without mentioning that the quote was originally reported in the Los Angeles Times. (Not the best example, because I think King said that at a press conference, but you take the point.)

You can not take a piece of original reporting—whether it’s a quote or a specific fact—that has not become commonplace and use it without attribution; that is the theft of intellectual property, and that is plagiarism.

(This is, of course, a subjective area; my rule of thumb is to err on the side of giving credit. I can’t say I’ve been 100% right about this, but I try.)

Because this is what reporters make their living from: reporting facts and getting quotes. I can tell you that not 1 in 100 writers would be happy about someone using a quote they reported, the product of their hard work, without attribution. And about the same number of journalists would feel comfortable using someone else’s quote in such a way.* If I had an intern who used a quote from another magazine article without attribution, I would instruct him that this is not how things are done in journalism; we build on the work of our peers and predecessors, and we acknowledge that work. If I had an editor who engaged in this practice repeatedly, I’d fire him.

So I am very surprised to hear Zakaria admit that he’s done this “hundreds” of times, unless perhaps he knew that the floodgates were about to open as people pored over his past work.

And the argument that crediting others would “interrupt the flow for the reader”? That’s nonsense; try endnotes. You’re not interrupting the flow; you’re actually adding value for the reader who’s interested in knowing the original source.

No, the only reason to engage in this practice is to make it look that you did work, whether journalistic or intellectual, that you did not do. I’m truly saddened and surprised by Zakaria’s argument.
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* Though I’ve actually had some bad experiences with journalists and attribution, which I may post here soon.

P.S. Speaking of attribution…thanks to Harry Lewis for posting the comment below that brought the WashPo article to my attention.

“Free Gift Voucher #1—3 Trees Planted in a National Forest. Free Gift Voucher #2—Free Copy of The Tree Book.”

—From the 1/2″-thick piece of junk mail I just received from the Arbor Day Foundation. Apparently you have to burn the village to save it.

“We’re capitalizing on a reality where students are on their laptops during class and they don’t want to pay attention to the lecture, so they’re on Her Campus reading the newest articles.”

—Harvard senior Annie Wang, talking (in Forbes) about her new entrepreneurial venture, a network of online women’s publications. It’s sort of fascinating: A Harvard student openly promoting a venture designed to facilitate the subversion of Harvard’s raison d’etre, i.e., teaching and learning. I wonder if Ms. Wang sees the irony.

I’m just curious: Are there any professors out there, at Harvard or elsewhere, who ban the use of laptops during class?

In thinking about the rash of plagiarism cases in recent years, I was struck by how many of the miscreants involved are graduates of Ivy League colleges.

For example:

Harvard grad Elizabeth Wurtzel reportedly plagiarized while at the Dallas Morning News.

Penn grad Stephen Glass—well, he didn’t really plagiarize, but you know the story.

Yale and Harvard grad Fareed Zakaria plagiarized from the New Yorker.

Columbia grad Jonah Lehrer plagiarized (himself, but also made up stuff) while working at the New Yorker.

Harvard grad Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarized in her novel How Oal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.

Harvardians Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree and Laurence Tribe have all committed plagiarism.

Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz has committed plagiarism. (I suspect he disputes this.)

Andrew Breitbart and Howie Carr argue that Harvard’s Elizabeth Warren committed plagiarism in a cookbook.

Do we just pay more attention to these cases when they involve an Ivy Leaguer, or is there something about Ivy League status—you’re tired of working as hard as it took to get there, but you definitely want to reap the rewards of being there—that leads some to cheat?

Writing on HuffPo, Jim Sleeper gives notice that he really, really doesn’t think much of Fareed Zakaria.

Also: that given Yale’s tough stance on plagiarism, and that the person Zakaria plagiarized from has a Ph.D. from Yale, Zakaria should resign or be suspended from the Yale Corporation.

And he reports one tidbit that I didn’t know but am astounded by: Zakaria charges $75, 000 for a speaking appearance—and he gets it.

So I repeat the point: There is a certain kind of journalist who writes primarily in order to be hired for more lucrative gigs—Gladwell, Lehrer, Zakaria. (In fairness, Gladwell’s written work is pretty lucrative in its own right, the other two’s somewhat less so.)

And at $75, 000 for an hour or so’s work, speechifying is attractive—I could make my annual salary in a morning. That’d be nice. There’s your kid’s private school tuition paid for at breakfast. Who would say no to that? Not me. (No one’s ever offered.)

But for $75, 000…you really ought to write your own stuff. That some people stop doing so shows how corrupting the speechifying et al can be.

I do wonder what Yale will do about Zakaria’s trusteeship. As Sleeper points out, Zakaria came to Yale’s aid on the debate over the Singapore campus, writing a vociferous (particularly by his standards) Yale Daily News article defending the wisdom of opening a campus in a country that doesn’t have freedom of speech.

Yale owes him one. Will this be payback time? And if so, will that be another compromising effect of the Singapore campus?

“Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States, Paul Ryan.”

—Mitt Romney, 9:29 Saturday

Whoops.

How embarrassing—after Ryan started to speak, Romney had to interrupt to correct his Freudian slip gaffe.

It’s gone viral!

This time the evildoer is my college classmate Fareed Zakaria, who, in a column he “wrote” for Time, plagiarized from Jill Lepore in the New Yorker.

The good news is, you’re plagiarizing from a reliable source. The bad news? Apparently a lot of people read the New Yorker.

Conservative media watchdog Newsbusters was the first to spot the similarities between a Zakaria piece on gun control and an article by Jill Lepore that appeared in the New Yorker in April.

Zakaria has quickly apologized:

“Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.”

This apology irritates me somewhat, because while it sounds pretty straight-up, it isn’t. Yes, there were “paragraphs” that were similar, but really, they were more than “similar”—they were almost exactly the same, with a few minor alterations that seemed added to establish that they were not exactly the same. A more candid apology would use the word “plagiarized,” I think.

Fareed is far too smart for this, which makes me think that the Time column was written for him by a ghostwriter. (Hence the “entirely my fault” language-trying to discourage the idea that he didn’t even “write” the damn thing.)

A digression that isn’t really a digression: Back when I was editing the now-infamous Stephen Glass, I once asked Steve how he could be so prolific—simultaneously writing for George, the New Republic, GQ and more. He told me that he had insomnia and got a lot of work done when he should have been sleeping. Great excuse! I totally bought it. Of course, it was all bullshit.

The lesson I took from that experience is that people who seem like they’re doing much more than most of us could do in the same amount of time…probably aren’t really doing it.

We all know, for example, certain Harvard professors who travel the world, sit on the boards of private companies, host television series, attend countless galas, summer in lovely places, teach once in a (long) while…and yet somehow manage to have their names on a long list of books they’ve written, co-written, edited, etc. Which means often that graduate students do a hefty chunk of their work, for which they get job recommendations and a hat tip in the acknowledgements.

So…back to Fareed. He’s got a national magazine column, a weekly TV show, travels around the world, commencement speeches, and probably lots of other stuff that I don’t know about. That doesn’t leave much time for thinking and writing. Anyway, writing a column is hard, unglamorous work. It’s not as fun as hopping a jet to Davos or schmoozing at the Aspen Institute or giving speeches for which you’re paid tens of thousands of dollars.

But…if you say you do it…you kinda have to do it. You can’t leverage all the gravitas you get from writing a column into more lucrative and less demanding pursuits and then not actually write the column. That’s…you know…cheating.

Update: I haven’t even posted yet and already there’s new news. Time has suspended Zakaria.

Welcome back, Bloc Party.