Jonah Lehrer Resignation

Jonah Lehrer / Flickr.com – poptech

As someone whose life is saturated with science news, it's been impossible to not notice Jonah Lehrer. I've read his work on The New Yorker and Wired, read about him at the New York Times and NPR, heard him contributing to Radiolab, and, finally, saw him speak a few months ago at First Fridays at the Natural History Museum.

As my buddies can attest, I was pretty excited to chat with Lehrer, particularly about the creativity in science education. I bought Proust was a Neuroscientist, got it signed, and spent the next few hours running about in jubilation (to be fair, the Grilled Cheese truck and getting to drink wine standing directly adjacent to dinosaur bones were also huge contributing factors to my ebullience).

A couple months later, news broke of the Lehrer Frontal Cortex self-plagiarism scandal, but I shrugged it off. Plagiarizing yourself… what does that even mean?

At the time, Lehrer pledged a renewed dedication to journalistic integrity; it wasn't going to happen again. Turns out, it was already too late: Imagine, the book that cost Lehrer his career this Monday, had already been published.

Michael Moynihan's Tablet article details the inaccuracies, fabrications, and contextual problems with the book's chapter on Bob Dylan, a story I personally heard Lehrer retell on stage and again on Radiolab. Most disappointing are Lehrer's lies to Moynihan, including inventing access to an unedited cut of a Dylan documentary that he now admits he never saw.

This is not a naive writer bungling a complex message, but a prolonged and deliberate deception and seems likely to overshadow much of the work he's done for years.

Now the web is abuzz with Lehrer's resignation from The New Yorker, and everyone's got a theory on the great unanswered question: Why?

Jayson Blair, another reporter whose career ended in a 2003 New York Times journalism scandal, shares with Salon 

I certainly understand that pressure. Once you’re young and successful, I think, in this profession you’re only as good as your last story — and you want every story to be better.

GOOD's Andrew Price cites overwhelming cultural consumption of Wow! stories and science churned up at unreal rate.

But Roxane Gay, in another Salon article, emphasizes the young-genius-boy-wonder rhetoric that shaped Lehrer's career arc. She doesn't give him too much benefit of the doubt:

There is hubris and there is hubris.

The tone of Moynihan's article is even.

Jonah Lehrer has resigned from the New Yorker and apologized to me. Not that this matters, but I accept his apology and wish him luck.
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) July 30, 2012

Moynihan told the NY Observer "I didn't want to twist the knife." Still, he says,

More than anything, though, by the way, I’m completely fucking mystified as to how somebody who does this sort of thing thinks they’re going to go work at The New Yorker. Those fact-checkers are obviously notorious, and that sort of stuff wouldn’t be published there.

(Which raises a whole 'nother question.)

Lesson learned:

If you think: no one will check, you're wrong: someone will. And the more visible the work, the more visible the check. nyti.ms/MwfT9v
— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) July 31, 2012