Last month, I reported that Jonah Lehrer, a noted young writer who covers neuroscience, had recycled material from other stories in his new blog for The New Yorker. Lehrer admitted wrongdoing and...
Category: creativity
Last month, I reported that Jonah Lehrer, a noted young writer who covers neuroscience, had recycled material from other stories in his new blog for The New Yorker. Lehrer admitted wrongdoing and briefly appeared able to weather the storm. He was not immediately dropped by The New Yorker, which promised that this sort of thing would not happen again.
Now Lehrer is in ashes, after admitting making up quotes from Bob Dylan, and insisting to a reporter that the quotes were not made up. The fabricated quotes appear in his new book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works," which has sold 200,000 copies, an achievement most authors can only dream of. The sad tale is recounted in this story in The New York Times...
21Jun 2012
Jonah Lehrer
Two years ago, I posted a piece here calling Jonah Lehrer the next Malcolm Gladwell. I understand that people have differing views of Gladwell, but I intended that as high praise. Like Gladwell, Lehrer had distinguished himself as a writer who could extract sometimes abstruse findings from neuroscience and show, with grace and wit, how they changed the way we think...
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