Journalist feels ‘horrible’ about revealing Jonah Lehrer’s f

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Journalist feels ‘horrible’ about revealing Jonah Lehrer’s f

Postby admin » Thu Apr 14, 2016 5:34 am

Journalist feels ‘horrible’ about revealing Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications
by Steve Myers
July 30, 2012

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Michael Moynihan does not feel good today, after writing the story that forced Jonah Lehrer to quit his job at The New Yorker and admit he had made up Bob Dylan quotations.

“I don't want the scalp,” Moynihan said in a phone interview. “It's not what I am interested in.”

Moynihan described in a story published in Tablet magazine how he sought to confirm seven Dylan quotations in Lehrer's book “Imagine: How Creativity Works.”

He corresponded with Lehrer for three weeks, starting July 8, in an effort to nail down the elusive sources of Dylan's comments. They also spoke by phone several times. Lehrer finally admitted Sunday afternoon that he had lied to Moynihan about where he had gotten some of them. Moynihan said he “had an inkling” then that Lehrer would resign.

Lehrer called Moynihan on Monday morning, shortly before the story was published, and told him he would resign. After they talked, “I felt horrible. I felt like shit," Moynihan said.

“I knew — he knew — this was a situation of his own making,” Moynihan said. He believes his story was “totally fair.” Still, when the result of a story is that “somebody's life is going to be unalterably changed ... it is not a burden you want on yourself.”

Lehrer said in a statement released by his publisher that the quotes Moynihan asked about “either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes.”

That statement was the first time that Moynihan heard Lehrer admit that some of those quotations had been fabricated. Even Sunday, he said, Lehrer insisted that the quotations were real, but he couldn't find the sources.

“All I squeezed out of him was the acknowledgement that he had lied to me about all this stuff,” Moynihan said. “I had a feeling from talking to him that he was going to do like OJ [Simpson] and look day and night to find the murderer, the real killer.”

Moynihan's search

The week of July 4, Moynihan was filling in on The Washington Post's Right Turn blog. He was thinking of doing a followup on the controversy over Lehrer “recycling” already published material for his New Yorker blog and his book.

He didn't know much about Lehrer, so he bought a copy of "Imagine" and read the first chapter because it was about Dylan. “A couple of those things struck me as a bit fishy,” he said.

He grew more suspicious when he couldn't find those quotations in a few places that should have had them. He was pretty sure that Lehrer never talked to Dylan, who is famously reticent toward the press.

When he shared the quotations with a “Dylanologist” friend of his, the friend noted that the quotes didn't even sound like Dylan.

“Dylan is the most documented musician on the planet,” Moynihan said, “and the obsession that fans have with Bob Dylan ensures that every utterance, every hiccup is available” on the Web or in a book called “The Fiddler Now Upspoke.”

Moynihan sent a friendly email to Lehrer asking for help finding the quotations. Lehrer responded the same day. “I think he regrets ever responding to me.”

The two emailed for weeks, including a break during which Lehrer said he was trying to track down the material. “I never believed him,” Moynihan said of Lehrer's explanations. “When someone essentially gives you sources that are very, very, very difficult to check, something is up.”

He was referring to Lehrer's contention that he had gotten some of the quotations from unreleased footage of Martin Scorsese's “No Direction Home” documentary, which Lehrer supposedly viewed in the company of Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosen.

Moynihan believes that Lehrer told him that story assuming it would be impossible to check, given Dylan's indifference to the media. But Moynihan was able to contact Rosen, who had an interest in setting the record straight.

Moynihan said he kept talking to Lehrer to give Lehrer the chance to prove him wrong – perhaps Lehrer was an amazing journalist who had found some undiscovered material that wasn't widely known. “I didn't want to be unfair to him, and I didn't want to be the person who writes a quick blog post and updates it.”

So, knowing what he does now, does Moynihan believe there are more Lehrer falsehoods waiting to be exposed? He doesn't know for sure, but “as you well know, people tend not to do these things once.”

And what about Dylan, does he know what happened? “My guess is that Dylan doesn't give a shit.”
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Re: Journalist feels ‘horrible’ about revealing Jonah Lehrer

Postby admin » Thu Apr 14, 2016 9:38 pm

Q & A: Michael C. Moynihan, The Guy Who Uncovered Jonah Lehrer’s Fabrication Problem
By Foster Kamer
07/30/12

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Long story short, over the last three weeks, widely ballyhooed author, contemporary thinker, and New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer has been questioned for what one reporter suspected were fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan—of all people—in the first chapter of Lehrer’s new book. The book, ‘Imagine,’ has been promoted everywhere from The Colbert Report to The New York Times to Glenn Beck’s radio show and beyond.

On Monday morning, the piece about Lehrer’s fabricated and re-contextualized quotes was published. Lehrer has since confessed to having fabricated the quotes, and resigned from his job at The New Yorker. His book was put on indefinite hold by its publisher (also, a Fake Bob Dylan quotes Twitter emerged).

The guy who started all of this? A Tablet contributor, former VICE editor, and Wall Street Journal freelancer, Michael C. Moynihan. The Observer reached Moynihan by phone this afternoon, and spoke with him about how he got started on this story, whether or not he thinks Lehrer is truly remorseful, and why he’s motivated to cover stories like these. Also: What it’s like to cause one of the more stunning turn of events in media this year.

‘Must be a pretty crazy day for you.

Yeah—I sort of expected something like this, but not on this scale.

What’s surprising you the most about the reaction? I can’t imagine watching it play out from your perspective.

To be honest? It’s a horrible, horrible, horrible feeling, and that’s not to mitigate in any way what Lehrer did, and what he was guilty of. And what he was trying to do to me, which was to get me to report stuff that wasn’t true.

What do you mean by trying to get you to report things that weren’t true?

If I trusted him initially, and didn’t follow these leads, and decided to write something about this, for instance…

As a Bob Dylan fan…

Yeah, as a Bob Dylan nerd. This quote that you can’t find, for instance, comes from an unedited cut. That’s not true. He [was] sort of suborning me to write things that aren’t true. That said, when I say I feel horrible about it, I spoke to Jonah, and I spoke to him at length, and we had exchanged a lot of emails about this material. I can’t help but feel terrible about what’s going to happen to him and what’s currently happening to his career. In that sense, it’s not a great feeling.

I’m not somebody who desires to nail a scalp to the wall. But I was reporting out a story I thought was interesting, and it became a story that was absolutely necessary to report to correct the record in a lot of ways. And he spun me up with a series of lies that he ultimately admitted to, and I have to write that. At the end of the day, when you see a guy who’s a promising young journalist—a very talented guy, a very smart guy, and a very good writer—and you see him lose his livelihood, it’s not something that makes you jump for joy.

Earlier this afternoon, journalist Jonathan Shainin Tweeted: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice knows that he’s actually in the schadenfreude business.” I could be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly malicious about all of this from your side.

No.

But there are definitely those people who have an inherent dislike or bias against these contemporary-thinkers-as-journalist types.

Oh, I think there’s an enormous amount of jealousy to see someone who’s 31 years-old, who gives TED Talks [Ed. Jonah Lehrer didn’t actually give a TED Talk, but did speak at PopTech] and has a column in the Wall Street Journal, then in Wired, then ascends to the height of The New Yorker and gets that sort of brass ring. That’s the schadenfreude that people love to…well, to quote a shitty Morrissey song, to say that “We hate it when our friends become successful.” There’s something to that. To be totally frank, I periodically write for the weekend section of the Wall Street Journal, and that was pretty much the only place I knew Lehrer from. I hadn’t read his book. I didn’t know what he was [beyond what] people told me: That he was sort of this [Malcolm] Gladwell-type—or this sort of thing that he did—I was unaware of that. I still didn’t know too much about him, but I did read this chapter in his book.

To be totally honest, I didn’t want to twist the knife. I don’t think the material was presented that way. I was not interested in that. But I did—unfortunately—come upon something that had to be reported. To me, there was no schadenfreude there. There was more schaden than freude. I had no real idea [of him]. I came across his stuff more or less when the whole self-plagiarizing scandal kind of came up.

Which you wrote of pretty evenhandedly, quoting someone who compared self-plagiarizing to stealing from one’s own refrigerator.

That was a great journalist friend of mine. And I kind of agree with him! My initial thing was: I had talked to two British journalists about a British writer whose piece I had noticed was in The New Statesman, and pretty much the same one a couple months later in The Telegraph. They said, ‘Oh, we do this all the time here, double-dipping is part of the game.’ And so I looked at this because I was interested in sorting out that issue. What is the difference ethically between the United Kingdom and here? Why is it acceptable there and frowned up here? Then I saw that Remnick [addressed it], and he was being perfectly reasonable. I was planning on doing a short little piece about that, and then I saw this chapter.

Do you think this would’ve been less damaging had Lehrer initially been forthright with you, instead of trying to obfuscate the truth?

Absolutely. But at the end of the day, we’re still left with the issue of where did these quotes come from. And this is Dylan. Everything [about him] is reported, every sneeze is analyzed. For fuck’s sake, there used to be that guy in the West Village—A.J. Weberman—who used to do Garbology, he used to sift through Dylan’s garbage when he lived in the West Village, and they famously had a fistfight on the street about this. It was: Why can’t I find these quotes? It was kind of stunning to me. He didn’t think I would do my due diligence. Jeff Rosen [Dylan’s manager] is a hard guy to get a hold of, but he’s not impossible.

The Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back is a favorite movie of mine. But had I read Lehrer’s piece, I wouldn’t have questioned that quote from the movie he extended into fiction. It seemed to track, and I would’ve shaped my memory of the quote from his book, which was wrong. And that’s especially odd.

It is. And the thing you have to ask yourself too, is: Why do that? Does it sharpen the point that much? I don’t think it does.

Did you get any insight into the “Why do that?” question from talking to Lehrer?

A bit. Yeah. I don’t think I’m ever going to revisit this, but there’s another piece to be written about the way this all unfolded. And again, I feel bad because: There’s a reason that when you get caught doing something, and you are grabbed by the police, that the police allow you to have a lawyer present. You’re panicking. You start saying things. And then you get in really, really deep. This is not something I did on a whim. I wasn’t trying to hurt him. As a matter of fact, when we were talking for so long, I was trying to help him, saying Let’s find this stuff. This was a three-week process. I could have taken it and put it up online as it progressed, and let the hive mind look for this stuff, and pinned him down…

But that would’ve been a little malicious.

That would’ve been malicious! And I swear on my life that was not my intention. That’s not something I wanted for him or would’ve wanted to have done to him.

Did he seem genuinely remorseful?

For it is very often found that after a person so convicted by credible witnesses has long persisted in his denials, he has at length relented, especially on being truly informed that he will not be delivered to the secular Court, but be admitted to mercy if he confesses his sin, and he has then freely confessed the truth which he had so long denied. And it is often found that the witnesses, actuated by malice and overcome by enmity, have conspired together to accuse an innocent person of the sin of heresy; but afterwards, at the frequent entreaty of the Bishop and his officers, their consciences have been stricken with remorse and, by Divine inspiration, they have revoked their evidence and confessed that they have out of malice put that crime upon the accused. Therefore the prisoner in such a case is not to be sentenced hastily, but must be kept for a year or more before he is delivered up to the secular Court.

-- The Malleus Maleficarum, by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger


Yes. He did. He did. You can make the argument that when there’s been so much deception, at this point, he’s trying to save his own skin, and I don’t know what it takes for somebody like this to have a second chance, or if that happens.

hy·per·bo·le
noun
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
synonyms: exaggeration, overstatement, magnification, embroidery, embellishment, excess, overkill, rhetoric; informal purple prose, puffery


There’s been these things that have sort of preceded this that don’t look good either.

in·nu·en·do
noun
an allusive or oblique remark or hint, typically a suggestive or disparaging one.
"he's always making sly innuendoes"
synonyms: insinuation, suggestion, intimation, implication, hint, overtone, undertone, allusion, reference; aspersion, slur


I really do wish him the best and I really do hope he recovers from this. 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. But back to your question, I did think based on our conversations that he is genuinely remorseful.

You’ve written about these kinds of ethical lapses before, right? There was that post at Reason about plagiarism…

Yeah. I also wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal last year about a book that was published by Knopf that was plagiarized. The amazing thing about that was: It was clear as day, the author never responded, and the book was then published in paperback with no corrections, because he wasn’t Jonah Lehrer. It was this guy named Dominic Sandbrook, the British historian. He hosts TV shows for the BBC. He’s not a small figure in the United Kingdom, but he is here. It got some pickup, but obviously, things are treated different. Here, because he wasn’t a big name, nobody cared.

I really resent people who plagiarize, and I didn’t catch Jonah Lehrer plagiarizing. But let me amend that: I resent people who cut corners, because I’m not the fastest writer in the world, and I spend time banging my head against the wall trying to make the words come out in the right way.

per·snick·et·y
adjective
placing too much emphasis on trivial or minor details; fussy.
"persnickety gardeners"
requiring a particularly precise or careful approach.
adjective: pernickety


I don’t like people who cheat.

Overstatement is an act of stating something more than it actually is in order to make the point more serious or important or beautiful.


That’s the incredible thing. Why do it? If you don’t have a source, if you don’t have a story, you just say: I don’t have the source. I don’t have the story. You learn and move on from it. And it’s the Internet! They’re all gonna get caught, eventually.

Yeah, but they don’t think that’s gonna happen.

Did this experience with Jonah Lehrer extend any knowledge you have of people who try to get away with these things?

I can’t prove this in any way, but I tend to think [with these kinds of books], the thesis of the chapter is line that everyone works backwards from. It’s the Gladwell kind of thing—and no accusations against him, I think he’s been very good, and people have wanted to take him down, and he would’ve been taken down if he was wrong, and I don’t think that he has [been taken down]. I actually think he’s very good, in fact. But I think those types of books—you know, Have you read this unbelievably clever Tipping Point kind-of-thing? I tend to believe the world doesn’t work that way. It’s horribly flabby and messy and complicated.

The truth is usually grey and boring.

Yeah! The truth is grey and boring and to make it less boring sometimes you have to punch things up. I think that’s what leads people to do this kind of thing. But I think the straight plagiarism thing—as was the case with Dominic Sandbrook—is a guy who’s producing too much. Writing a column, teaching, putting out three books in a year in a half.

I wonder if that’s a sense of urgency, or a sense of entitlement? As in: I work so hard, I’m allowed to take liberties with ethics.

I don’t know. I’m a guy that went to state school and is at 37 blogging and freelancing. What it’s like to be in that pressure cooker situation—being a Rhodes Scholar as Jonah Lehrer was, rising up the ranks so quickly as he did, and getting to that place like The New Yorker and having to perform? His initial performance there was to cannibalize his own material. I think that shows a level of pressure and a level of stress that affects this and guides people’s behavior.

Follow Michael C. Moynihan on Twitter here. Do not try to get anything past him.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek
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Re: Journalist feels ‘horrible’ about revealing Jonah Lehrer

Postby admin » Thu Apr 14, 2016 10:27 pm

Part 1 of 2

Excerpt from "So You've Been Publicly Shamed"
by Jon Ronson
Copyright © 2015 by Jon Ronson

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Two: I'm Glad I'm Not That

In the middle of the night on July 4, 2012, Michael C. Moynihan lay on his sofa. His wife, Joanne, was asleep upstairs with their young daughter. They were broke, as they always were. Everybody seemed to make more money in journalism than Michael did. "I can never turn it into money," he'd later tell me. "I don't know how to do it."

These were anxious times. He was thirty-seven and scraping by as a blogger and a freelancer in a walk-up in a not-great part of Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

But he'd just had a job offer. The Washington Post had invited him to blog for ten days. Not that the timing was so great: "It was July Fourth. Everyone was on vacation. There were no readers and there wasn't a lot of news." But still, it was a break. And it was stressing Michael out. The stress had just spoiled a vacation in Ireland visiting his wife's family, and now it was stressing him out on his sofa.

He began hunting around for story ideas. On a whim he downloaded the latest number-one New York Times nonfiction bestseller from the young, handsome, and internationally renowned pop-psychology author Jonah Lehrer. It was a book about the neurology of creativity and was called Imagine: How Creativity Works.

The first chapter, "Bob Dylan's Brain," piqued Michael's interest, as he was a keen Dylanologist. Jonah Lehrer was reconstructing a critical moment in Dylan's creative career-the thought process that led him to write "Like a Rolling Stone."

It was May 1965 and Dylan was bored, weary from a grueling tour, "skinny from insomnia and pills," sick of his music, thinking he had nothing left to say. As Jonah Lehrer writes:

The only thing he was sure of was that this life couldn't last. Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper he made the same observation: "God, I'm glad I'm not me," he said. ''I'm glad I'm not that."


So Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. He moved to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. His plan was to perhaps write a novel.

But then, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling.

"It's a hard thing to describe," Dylan would later remember. "It's just this sense that you got something to say."


It was no wonder Imagine had become such a bestseller. Who wouldn't want to read that if they're creatively blocked and feeling hopeless they're just like Bob Dylan immediately before he wrote "Like a Rolling Stone"?

Michael Moynihan, I should explain, hadn't downloaded Jonah Lehrer's book because he was blocked and needed inspirational advice about how to write a Washington Post blog. Jonah Lehrer had recently been embroiled in a minor scandal and Michael was considering blogging about it. Some columns he had written for The New Yorker had, it turned out, been recycled from columns he'd published months earlier in The Wall Street Journal. Michael was considering blogging on how "self-plagiarism" was considered less of a crime in Britain than in America and what that said about the two cultures.

But now Michael suddenly stopped reading. He went back a sentence.

"It's a hard thing to describe," Dylan would later remember. "It's just this sense that you got something to say."


Michael narrowed his eyes. When the fuck did Bob Dylan say that? he thought.

"What made you suspicious?" I asked Michael. The two of us were eating lunch at the Cookshop restaurant in Manhattan's Chelsea district. Michael was handsome and fidgety. His eyes were pale and darting like a husky's.

"It just didn't sound like Dylan," he said. "In that period, in every interview Dylan did, he was a total asshole to the interviewer. This sounded like a Dylan self-help book."

And so, on his sofa, Michael scanned back a few paragraphs.

Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper, he made the same observation: "God, I'm glad I'm not me," he said. "I'm glad I'm not that."


In D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Dont Look Back (the missing apostrophe was the director's idea), Dylan reads an article about himself: "Puffing heavily on a cigarette, he smokes 80 a day ... " Dylan laughs, "God, I'm glad I'm not me."

How did Jonah Lehrer know that Dylan said this whenever he read about himself in the paper? Michael thought. Where did "whenever" come from? Plus, "God, I'm glad I'm not me" is verifiable, but ''I'm glad I'm not that"? When did he say, ''I'm glad I'm not that?" Where did Jonah Lehrer get "I'm glad I'm not that"?

And so Michael Moynihan e-mailed Jonah Lehrer.

I picked up your book and as an obsessive Dylan nerd eagerly read the first chapter ... I'm pretty familiar with the Dylan canon and there were a few quotes I was slightly confused by and couldn't locate.


This was Michael's first e-mail to Jonah Lehrer. He was reading it to me back home in his Fort Greene living room. Joanne sat with us. There were toys scattered around.

By the time Michael e-mailed Jonah on July 7, he'd pinpointed six suspicious Dylan quotes, including "It's just this sense that you got something to say," ''I'm glad I'm not that," and this angry retort to prying journalists: "I've got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There's no great message. Stop asking me to explain."

Dylan did once verifiably say in Dont Look Back, ''I've got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There's no great message."

But there was no "Stop asking me to explain."

Michael mentioned to Jonah his deadline-he was blogging for The Washington Post for ten days-and then he pressed send.

Jonah e-mailed Michael back twice the next day. His e-mails sounded friendly, professional, businesslike, maybe a little superior. His air was that of a smart young academic understanding Michael's questions and promising to answer them during an appropriate moment in his schedule. Which would be in eleven days. He was on vacation in Northern California for ten days. His files were at his home, a seven-hour drive away. He didn't want to disrupt his vacation by driving fourteen hours to check his files. If Michael could wait ten days, Jonah would send him detailed notes.

Michael smiled when he read out that part of Jonah's e-mail to me. Eleven days was quite the convenient vacation length given the duration of Michael's Washington Post contract.

Still, Jonah said he'd try to answer Michael's questions off the top of his head.

"And this," Michael said, "was where it all began to unravel for him. This is where he makes his first underplayed lie. He's hesitating. 'Do I make this lie?'"

Jonah made the lie.

"I got a little bit of help," he wrote, "from one of Dylan's managers."

This manager had given Jonah access to previously unreleased original transcripts of Dylan interviews. If there were any discrepancies with common references on the Web, that was why.

Jonah's e-mails continued in this vein for several paragraphs: Dylan had told a radio interviewer to "stop asking me to explain" in 1995. The interview was transcribed within the pages of a rare multivolume anthology called The Fiddler Now Upspoke: A Collection of Bob Dylan's Interviews, Press Conferences and the Like from Throughout the Master's Career. And so on. Then Jonah thanked Michael for his interest, signed off, and at the bottom of the e-mails were the words "Sent from my iPhone."

"Sent from his iPhone," Michael said. "A rather lengthy e-mail to send from an iPhone. Slightly panicky. Sweaty thumbs, you know?"

Who knew if Jonah Lehrer really was on vacation? But Michael had to take him at his word. So they had a lull. The lull made publication in the Washington Post blog impossible, given the digging Michael would need to do. The Fiddler Now Upspoke was a nightmare source: "Eleven volumes, twelve volumes, fifteen volumes. Individual ones cost a hundred fifty, two hundred dollars."

Jonah Lehrer presumably thought Michael hadn't the wherewithal to trace, purchase, and scrutinize an anthology as epic and obscure as The Fiddler Now Upspoke. But he underestimated the nature of Michael's tenacity. There was something about Michael that reminded me of the cyborg in Terminator 2, the one that was even more dogged than Arnold Schwarzenegger, running faster than the fastest car. As Joanne told me, "Michael is the guarder of social rules." She turned to him. "You're a nice guy as long as everyone else ... "

"When I go out in the world," Michael said, "if someone throws some garbage on the street, it's the most senseless thing to me. I lose my mind. 'Why are you doing this?' "

"And it's for hours," Joanne said. "We're out on a nice walk and it's a half-an-hour rant ... "

"I see things collapsing," Michael said.

And so Michael tracked down an electronic version of The Fiddler Now Upspoke. Well, it wasn't an actual electronic version, but "a complete archive of all known Dylan interviews called Every Mind-Polluting Word," Michael told me, "basically a digital version of Fiddler that a fan put together and dumped online." It turned out that Bob Dylan had given only one radio interview in 1995 and at no time during it had he told the interviewer to "stop asking me to explain."

On July 11, Michael was in the park with his wife and daughter. It was hot. His daughter was running in and out of the fountain. Michael's phone rang. The voice said, "This is Jonah Lehrer."

I know Jonah Lehrer's voice now. If you had to describe it in a word, that word would be measured.

"We had a really nice talk," Michael said, "about Dylan, about journalism. I told him I wasn't trying to make a name for myself with this. I said I'd been grinding away at this for years and I'm just-you know-I do what I do and I feed my family and everything's okay."

The way Michael said the word okay made it sound like he meant "barely okay." It was the vocal equivalent of a worried head glancing down at the floor.

"I told him I'm not one of those young Gawker guys going, 'Find me a target I can burn in the public square and then people will know who I am.' And Jonah said, 'I really appreciate that.'''

Michael liked Jonah. "I got along with him. It was really nice. It was a really nice conversation." They said their goodbyes. A few minutes later, Jonah e-mailed Michael to thank him once again for being so decent and not like one of those Gawker guys who delight in humiliation. They didn't make them like Michael anymore.

After that, Michael went quiet so he could dig around on Jonah some more.

These were the good days. Michael felt like Hercule Poirot. Jonah's claim that he'd had a little bit of help from one of Dylan's managers had sounded suspiciously vague, Michael had thought. And, indeed, it turned out that Bob Dylan had only one manager. His name was Jeff Rosen. And although Jeff Rosen's e-mail address was hard to come by, Michael came by it.

Michael e-mailed him. Had Jeff Rosen ever spoken to Jonah Lehrer? Jeff Rosen replied that he never had.

So Michael e-mailed Jonah to say he had some more questions.

Jonah replied, sounding surprised. Was Michael still going to write something? He assumed Michael wasn't going to write anything.

Michael shook his head with incredulity when he recounted this part to me. Jonah had obviously convinced himself that he'd sweet-talked Michael out of investigating him. But no. "Bad liars always think they're good at it," Michael said to me. "They're always confident they're defeating you."

"I've spoken to Jeff Rosen," Michael told Jonah.

And that, Michael said, is when Jonah lost it. "He just lost it. I've never seen anyone like it."

•••

Jonah started repeatedly telephoning Michael, pleading with him not to publish. Sometimes Michael would silence his iPhone for a while. Then he'd return to find so many missed calls from Jonah that he would take a screenshot because nobody would otherwise have believed it. I asked Michael at what point it stopped being fun, and he replied, "When your quarry starts panicking." He paused. "It's like being out in the woods hunting and you're, 'This feels great!' And then you shoot the animal and it's lying there twitching and wants its head to be bashed in and you're, 'I don't want to be the person to do this. This is fucking horrible.'"

Michael got a call from Jonah's agent, Andrew Wylie. He represents not just Jonah but also Bob Dylan and Salman Rushdie and David Bowie and David Byrne and David Rockefeller and V. S. Naipaul and Vanity Fair and Martin Amis and Bill Gates and King Abdullah II of Jordan and Al Gore. Actually, Andrew Wylie didn't phone Michael. "He got in touch with somebody who got in touch with me to tell me to call him," Michael told me. "Which I thought was very Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He's thought to be the most powerful literary agent in the United States and I'm a schlub, I'm a nobody. So I called him. I laid out the case. He said, 'If you publish this, you're going to ruin a guy's life. Do you think this is a big enough deal to ruin a guy's life?'''

"How did you reply?" I asked.

"I said, 'I'll think about it,''' Michael said. "I guess Andrew Wylie is a bazillionaire because he's very perceptive, because I got a call from Jonah, who said, 'So Andrew Wylie says you're going to go ahead and publish.'''

On the afternoon of Sunday, July 29, Michael was walking down Flatbush Avenue, on the telephone to Jonah, shouting at him, "'I need you to go on the record. You have to do it, Jonah. You have to go on the record.' My arms were going crazy. I was so angry and so frustrated. All the time he was wasting. All his lies. And he was simpering." Finally something in Jonah's voice made Michael know that it was going to happen. "So I ran into Duane Reade, and I bought a fucking Hello Kitty notebook and a pen, and in twenty-five seconds, he said, 'I panicked. And I'm deeply sorry for lying.'''

''And there you go," said Michael. "It's done."

Twenty-six days, and it took Michael forty minutes to write the story. He'd still not worked out how to make money from journalism. He'd agreed to give the scoop to a small Jewish online magazine, Tablet. Knowing how lucky they were, the people at Tablet paid Michael quadruple what they usually pay, but it was quadruple of not much: $2,200 total-which is all he'd ever make from the story.

Forty minutes to write it, and what felt to him like nine packs of cigarettes.

"If anything, Jonah Lehrer nearly killed me I smoked so many fucking cigarettes out on the fire escape. Smoking, smoking, smoking. When you have the ability to press send on something and really, really affect the outcome of the rest of that person's life. And the phone was ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing. There were twenty-odd missed calls from Jonah that Sunday night. Twenty-four missed calls, twenty-five missed calls."

"He kept phoning," Joanne said. "It was so sad. I don't understand why he thought it was a good idea to keep phoning."

"It was the worst night of his life," I said.

"Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure," Michael said.

Finally, Michael picked up the phone. "I said, 'Jonah, you have to stop calling me. This is almost to the point of harassment.' I felt like I was talking him off the ledge. I said, 'Tell me you're not going to do anything stupid.' It was that level of panic. So much so that I thought maybe I should pull back from this. He was, 'Please, please, please,' like a child's toy breaking, droning, running out of batteries, 'Please please, please ...'"

Michael asked me if I'd ever been in that position. Had I ever stumbled on a piece of information that, if published, would destroy someone? Actually destroy them.

I thought for a while. "Destroy someone?" I said. I paused. "No. I don't think so. I'm not sure."

"Don't ever do it," he said.

Michael said he honestly considered not pressing send that night. Jonah had a young daughter the same age as Michael's young daughter. Michael said he couldn't kid himself. He understood what pressing send would mean to Jonah's life: "What we do, when we fuck up, we don't lose our job. We lose our vocation."

Michael was thinking of former journalists like The New Republic's Stephen Glass. Glass was the author of a celebrated 1998 story, "Hack Heaven," about a fifteen-year-old schoolboy hacker who was offered a job with a software company he'd hacked into. Glass wrote about being a fly-on-the-wall in the company's offices-Jukt Micronics-as the boy negotiated his terms:

"I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Men comic number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy-and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!" Across the table, executives ... are listening and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you."

-- STEPHEN GLASS. "WASHINGTON SCENE: HACK HEAVEN," The New Republic, MAY 18. 1998


But there was no conference room, no Jukt Micronics, no schoolboy hacker. A Forbes digital journalist, Adam Penenberg, annoyed that The New Republic had scooped him on his own turf, did some digging and discovered that Glass had invented it all. Glass was fired. He later enrolled in law school, earned a degree magna cum laude, applied in 2014 to practice law in California, and was refused. Glass's shaming was following him around wherever he went, like Pigpen's cloud of dirt. In some ways, he and Jonah Lehrer were eerily alike-young, nerdy, Jewish, preternaturally successful journalists on a roll who made things up. But Glass had invented entire scenarios, casts of characters, reams of dialogue. Jonah's ''I'm glad I'm not that" at the end of ''I'm glad I'm not me" was stupid and wrong, but a world that doled out punishments as merciless as that would be unfathomable to me. I thought Michael was being overly dramatic to believe that pressing send would sentence Jonah to Stephen Glass-level oblivion.

In the end, it was all academic for Michael. He said he felt as trapped in this story as Jonah was. It was like they were both in a car with failed brakes, hurtling helplessly toward this ending together. How could Michael not press send? What would people think if the story got out? That he'd covered it up for career advancement? "I would have been the spineless so-called journalist who buckled to Andrew Wylie. I never would have worked again."

Plus, Michael said, something had happened a few hours earlier that he felt made it impossible for him to bury the story. After Jonah had confessed over the phone to him, Michael was shaking, so he went to a cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to calm down. It was the Cafe Regular du Nord. As he sat outside, he ran into a fellow writer, Vanity Fair's Dana Vachon.

"I'm doing this story and this guy just fucking confessed to me that it's all phony," Michael told him.

"Who?" Dana Vachon replied.

"I can't tell you," Michael said.

That second Michael's phone rang. The screen flashed up the words JONAH LEHRER.

"Oh," Dana Vachon said. "Jonah Lehrer."

"Fuck you!" Michael said. "You can't say anything!"

So now Dana Vachon knew. Michael's editors at Tablet knew. Andrew Wylie knew. It was not going to stay contained.

So Michael pressed send.

Michael had one final telephone conversation with Jonah after they both knew it was over. It was just a few hours before the story appeared. Michael had barely slept that night. He was exhausted. He said to Jonah, "I just want you to know that it makes me feel like shit to do this."

"And Jonah paused," Michael told me. "And then he said to me, no joke, he said, 'You know, I really don't care how you feel.''' Michael shook his head. "It was icy."

Then Jonah said to Michael, "I really, really regret ... "

Regret what? Michael thought. Cheating? Lying?

"I really regret ever responding to your e-mail," Jonah said. "And my response to him," Michael said, "was basically silence."

That night Michael was "shattered. I felt horrible. I'm not a fucking monster. I was crushed and depressed. My wife can confirm this." He replayed in his mind his telephone conversations with Jonah. Suddenly, he felt suspicious. Maybe the icy Jonah from that final conversation had been the real Jonah all along. Maybe Jonah had been playing Michael all that time, "cranking the emotions" to guilt-trip him. Maybe Jonah had assessed Michael as "pliable and easy to manipulate." When Michael had told Jonah that he'd spoken to Jeff Rosen, Jonah's reply had been "Then I guess you're a better journalist than me." That suddenly sounded incredibly condescending to Michael, like he saw Michael as just "some putz piddling around trying to pick up freelance work." Maybe everything Jonah had done during the previous weeks was, in fact, devious and very well plotted.

I wondered: Had Jonah really been devious, or just terrified? Was Michael conjuring up words like devious in an attempt to feel less bad? Devious is creepy. Terrified is human.

"Having a phone conversation with somebody is like reading a novel," Michael said. "Your mind creates a scenario. I sort of knew what he looked like from his author jacket photos, but I'd never seen him move. I didn't know his gait. I didn't know his clothes. Well, I knew he posed in his hipster glasses. But over those four weeks, I was imagining this character. I was picturing his house. A little house. He's a journalist. I'm a journalist. I'm a fucking schlub. I pay my rent. I'm fine, I'm happy, but I'm not doing great."

This was about the third time Michael had described himself to me as a "schlub" or something similar. I suppose he knew that highlighting this aspect of himself made for the most dramatic, likable retelling of the collision between the two men. The nobody blogger and the crooked VIP. David and Goliath. But I wondered ifhe was doing it for more than just storytelling reasons. All the stuff he said about how it wasn't his fault that he stumbled onto the story, how he made no money from it, how the stress nearly killed him, how he was actually trapped into it by Andrew Wylie and Dana Vachon ... it suddenly hit me: Michael was traumatized by what he had done. When he'd said to me, "Don't ever do it"-don't ever press send on a story that would destroy someone-it wasn't a figure of speech. He meant it.

"I was picturing his house, a little house," Michael continued. "I was transferring my life onto his. His wife's bustling around, his kid's in the background, he's in one of the two bedrooms at the back, sweating." Michael paused. "And then my friend from the Los Angeles Times sent me a story from 2009 about the purchase of the Julius Shulman house."

The Hollywood Hills residence and studio of the late iconic photographer Julius Shulman has sold for $2.25 million. The Midcentury Modern steel-frame house, built in 1950 and designed by Raphael S. Soriano, is a Los Angeles historic landmark. The buyer is bestselling author and lecturer Jonah Lehrer. His book "How We Decide" has been translated into a dozen languages. The writer has an affinity for classic design.

-LAUREN BEALE, Los Angeles Times, DECEMBER 4, 2010


Image
The Shulman House. Photograph by Michael K. Wilkinson, reproduced with his permission.

"It's unfair," Michael said. "It's stupid of me. In some ways it's unconscionable to begrudge him his success. But it made things a bit different."

***

A few weeks after Michael told me his Jonah Lehrer story, I was at a party in London, talking to a man I didn't know. He was a theater director. He asked me what I was writing about and I told him about Michael and Jonah. Sometimes, when I recount for people the stories I'm working on, I feel a stupid grin on my face as I describe the absurdity of whatever crazy pickle this or that interviewee had got himself into. But not this time. As I related the details to him, the director shivered. And I found myself shivering too. When I finished the story, he said, "It's about the terror, isn't it?"

"The terror of what?" I said.

"The terror of being found out," he said.

He looked as if he felt he were taking a risk even mentioning to me the existence of the terror. He meant that we all have ticking away within us something we fear will badly harm our reputation if it got out-some "I'm glad I'm not that" at the end of an "I'm glad I'm not me." I think he was right. Maybe our secret is actually nothing horrendous. Maybe nobody would even consider it a big deal if it was exposed. But we can't take that risk. So we keep it buried. Maybe it's a work impropriety. Or maybe it's just a feeling that at any moment we'll blurt something out during some important meeting that'll prove to everyone that we aren't proper professional people or, in fact, functional human beings. I think that even in these days of significant oversharing we keep this particular terror concealed, like people used to with things like masturbation before everyone suddenly got blase about it online. With masturbation, nobody cares. Whereas our reputation-it's everything.

I had leaped into the middle of the Michael-:-Jonah story because I admired Michael and identified with him. He personified citizen justice, whereas Jonah represented literary fraud in the pop-science world. He made a fortune corrupting an already self-indulgent, bloated genre. I still admired Michael. But suddenly, when the theater director said the words the terror of being found out, I felt like a door had briefly opened before me, revealing some infinite horror land .filled with millions of scared-stiff Jonahs. How many people had I banished to that land during my thirty years of journalism? How truly nightmarish it must have been to be Jonah Lehrer.
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Re: Journalist feels ‘horrible’ about revealing Jonah Lehrer

Postby admin » Thu Apr 14, 2016 10:27 pm

Part 2 of 2

Three: The Wilderness

Runyon Canyon, West Hollywood. If you were a passing hiker and you didn't know that Jonah Lehrer had been totally destroyed, you wouldn't have guessed it. He looked like he did in his old author photographs-pleasing to the eye, a little aloof, as if he were thinking higher thoughts and expressing them in a considered manner to his fellow hiker -- me. But we weren't having a considered conversation. For the last hour, Jonah had been repeatedly telling me, in a voice strained to its breaking point, "I don't belong in your book."

And I was repeatedly replying, "Yes, you do."

I didn't understand what he was talking about. I was writing a book about public shaming. He had been publicly shamed. He was ideal.

Now he suddenly stopped in the middle of the hiking trail and looked intently at me. "I am a terrible story to put in your book," he said.

"Why?" I said.

"What's that William Dean Howells line?" he said. "'Americans like a tragedy with a happy ending'?"

The actual William Dean Howells line is "What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending." I think Jonah was close enough.

I was here because Jonah's shaming felt to me like a really important one-the shape of things to come. He was a dishonest, number-one bestselling author who had been exposed by the sort of person who used to be powerless. And despite seeing Jonah's face etched in panic and misery on the hiking trail, I was sure the renaissance in public shaming was a good thing. Look at who was being laid low-bigoted Daily Mail columnists, monolithic gym chains with pitiless cancellation policies, and, most heinous of all, horrific academic spambot creators. Jonah had written some very good things during his short career. Some of his work had been wonderful. But he had repeatedly transgressed, he had done bad things, and the uncovering of his lies was appropriate.

Still, as we walked, I felt for Jonah. Close-up, I could see he was suffering terribly. Michael had called his cover-up a "great deception that was very, very well plotted." But I think it was just chaos, and on that last day before the story broke, Jonah wasn't "icy" but wrecked.

''I'm just drenched in shame and regret," he had e-mailed me before I flew to Los Angeles to meet him. "The shaming process is fucking brutal."

Jonah was offering the same dismal prediction about his future as Michael and Andrew Wylie had offered. He was foreseeing a lifetime of ruin. Imagine being thirty-one in a country that venerates redemption and second chances. and convinced your tragedy has no happy ending. But I thought he was being too pessimistic. Surely, after paying some penance, after spending some time in the wilderness, he could convince his readers and peers that he could change his ways. He could find a way back in. I mean, we weren't monsters.

***

Science writing had been Jonah Lehrer's ambition from the start. After he'd agreed to meet me, I found an old interview he gave ten years ago, when he was twenty-one.

[He] hopes to become a science writer. "Science is too often perceived as cold," he says. "I want to translate science and show how beautiful it can be."

-- KRISTIN STERLING, Columbia News, DECEMBER 2002


That interview was published on the occasion of the announcement that Jonah had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford as a graduate student for two years. "Each year 32 young Americans are selected as Rhodes Scholars," according to the Rhodes Scholarship website, "chosen not only for their outstanding scholarly achievements, but for their character, commitment to others and to the common good."

The secret society of Cecil Rhodes is mentioned in the first five of his seven wills. In the fifth it was supplemented by the idea of an educational institution with scholarships, whose alumni would be bound together by common ideals — Rhodes's ideals. In the sixth and seventh wills the secret society was not mentioned, and the scholarships monopolized the estate. But Rhodes still had the same ideals and still believed that they could be carried out best by a secret society of men devoted to a common cause. The scholarships were merely a facade to conceal the secret society, or, more accurately, they were to be one of the instruments by which the members of the secret society could carry out his purpose. This purpose, as expressed in the first will (1877), was:

"The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise, . . . the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire, the consolidation of the whole Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial Representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire, and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity."


-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley


Bill Clinton had been a Rhodes Scholar, as had the cosmologist Edwin Hubble, and the film director Terrence Malick. In 2002 only two Columbia students were awarded the accolade-Jonah Lehrer and Cyrus Habib, who is now, ten years on, one of the few fully blind American politicians and the highest-ranking Iranian-American in political office in the United States, serving in the Washington state legislature. Cyrus Habib sounds amazing.

Jonah began writing his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, while he was still a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Its premise is that the great neuroscience breakthroughs of today had all been made one hundred years ago by artists like Cezanne and Proust. It was a lovely book. Jonah was smart and he wrote well-which isn't the same as saying Mussolini made the trains run on time. Jonah wrote good things throughout his short career, essays untainted by transgression. After Proust came How We Decide and, last, Imagine. Along the way, Jonah earned a fortune giving inspirational keynotes at-to name a few of the innumerable conferences he spoke at that I had never heard of-the 2011 International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in San Diego; FUSION, the Eighth Annual Desire2Learn Users Conference in Denver; and the 2012 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations National Conference in Seattle.

At this last one he told the story of a young athlete-a high jumper who could never clear the bar, however hard he tried. All the other jumpers mocked him. But then he thought counterintuitively about it, invented a new jumping style that would be called the Fosbury Flop, and won the 1968 Olympic gold medal. By now, Jonah was commanding vast speaker fees-tens of thousands of dollars. I suppose he was being rewarded so richly because his messages were inspirational. My talks tend to be more disincentivizing, which, I have noticed, pays less.

The adjective most often applied to Jonah was "Gladwellian," Malcolm Gladwell being the New Yorker writer and author of the era's most successful counterintuitive popscience book, The Tipping Point. Jonah's book jackets looked like Malcolm Gladwell's book jackets. Their jackets looked like Apple computer packaging. Jonah was becoming a sensation. When he switched jobs, it was a news story.

JONAH LEHRER JUMPS FROM WIRED TO THE NEW YORKER

Jonah Lehrer, the author of the popular science books "Proust Was a Scientist [sic]," "How We Decide" and 2012's "Imagine," has left his post as a contributing editor at Wired for the New Yorker, where he'll be a staff writer.

In many ways, Lehrer is a younger, brain-centered version of Gladwell, making him a natural New Yorker fit.

-- CAROLYN KELLOGG. Los Angeles Times. JUNE 7, 2012


Jonah resigned from The New Yorker after seven weeks in the job, the day Michael's article appeared. On the Sunday night before publication, Jonah had been giving a keynote at the 2012 Meeting Professionals International's World Education Congress in St. Louis. The subject of his talk was the importance of human interaction. During the talk -- according to a tweet posted by an audience member, the journalist Sarah Braley-Jonah revealed that since the invention of Skype, attendance at meetings had actually gone up by 30 percent. After he left the stage, Sarah found him and asked where that implausible statistic had come from. "A conversation with a Harvard professor," he replied. But when she requested the professor's name, he mysteriously refused to divulge it. ''I'd have to ask him if it's all right to tell you," he explained. She gave Jonah her card but never heard from him, which didn't surprise her because the next morning he was disgraced and resigned his job.

In the days that followed, Jonah's publisher withdrew and pulped every copy of Imagine still in circulation, and offered refunds to all who had bought one. The Dylan quotes had been enough to bring Jonah down. His subsequent panic spiral was definitely enough-Michael wrote in his expose that Jonah had "stonewalled, misled, and, eventually, outright lied" to him. Internet message boards were replete with comments like "The twerp is such a huge over-achiever that there's something delightful about seeing him humbled" (The Guardian) and "Save the royalties from your book, blockhead, 'cause you're gonna need the money" (The New York Times) and "It must be strange to be so full of lies" (Tablet).

In Brooklyn, Michael was agonizing over whether he'd been right to press send. Although he'd essentially seen his takedown of Jonah as a righteous strike against the popscience genre- "To make a tight little package where my mother would be like, 'Ooh, I just read this thing, did you know that X leads to Y,' you have to fucking cut corners" -- Andrew Wylie's words were haunting him. Maybe it wasn't enough to ruin a man's life over.

But there was worse to come. Wired magazine asked the journalism professor Charles Seife to study eighteen columns Jonah had written for them. All but one, he reported, revealed "evidence of some journalistic misdeed." It was mainly Jonah reusing his own sentences in different stories, but that wasn't all. Imagine if I had failed to put quotation marks around the sentences I lifted earlier from the Rhodes Scholarship website. It was that kind of pervasive sloppiness/plagiarism. Probably the worst infraction was that Jonah had taken some paragraphs from a blog written by Christian Jarrett of the British Psychological Society and passed them off as his own.

Michael was massively relieved-he told me-that "the rot spidered out to every book, every piece of journalism."

Jonah vanished, leaving a final, innocent prehumiliation tweet like a plate of congealing food on the Mary Celeste.

Fiona Apple'snew album is "astonishing," rhapsodizes @sfj.

-- @JONAHLEHRER, JUNE 18, 2012


He ignored all interview requests. He resurfaced only once, to briefly tell Los Angeles magazine's Amy Wallace that he wasn't giving any interviews. So it was a great surprise when he responded to my e-mail. He was "happy to be in touch," he wrote me, and "happy to chat on the phone or whatever." In the end, we arranged to go hiking in the Hollywood Hills. I flew to Los Angeles even though his final e-mail to me included an unexpected and unsettling sentence toward the end: ''I'm not sure I'm ready to be a case study or talk on the record."

It seemed appropriate that we were hiking in a desert canyon, because his punishment felt quite biblical, a public shaming followed by a casting out into the wilderness, although that analogy only went so far because biblical wildernesses tend not to be filled with extremely beautiful movie stars and models walking their dogs.

We walked in silence for a while. Then Jonah listed two more reasons (alongside the "Americans want tragedies with happy endings" one) why I shouldn't write about him. First, if I was planning to be kind to him, he didn't deserve it. And, second, a warning: "What I mostly feel is intensely radioactive. So even people who come to me with good intentions, I end up transferring my isotopes onto them."

Jonah was saying that spending time with him would ruin me in some unexpected way. "Well, that's not going to happen to me!" I laughed.

"Then you'll be the first," he said.

As he said this, a bolt of panic shot into me. It was a frightening thing for someone to say. Still, I kept trying to convince him, on and on, but each line of reasoning seemed to make him more anguished, as if I were a siren trying to lure him to the rocks with my song of possible redemption. He said his worst days were when he allowed himself to hope for a second chance. The best were when he knew it was over forever and his destruction was necessary as a deterrent to others.

I gave up. Jonah drove me back to my hotel. In the car I stared at my lap, exhausted, like a cold-caller after a long shift.

Then, suddenly, Jonah said, "I've decided to make a public apology."

I looked up at him. "Have you?"

"Next week," Jonah said. "In Miami. At a Knight lunch."

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was created by the owners of the Chicago Daily News and The Miami Herald to fund young journalists with innovative ideas. There was to be a conference for the fund organizers, Jonah said, and he'd been asked to deliver the after-lunch keynote on the final day. As an advocate of digital media, the foundation planned to broadcast his speech live on its website.

"I keep writing and scrapping and rewriting it," Jonah said. "Would you read it over? Maybe after that we can discuss whether I fit your narrative?"

***

I am the author of a book on creativity that is best known because it contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes. I committed plagiarism on my blog. I lied. repeatedly, to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.


I sat on the plane reading Jonah's apology speech. It was a stark opening-an unembellished declaration of guilt, followed by an account of his shame and regret.

I think about all the readers I've disappointed, people who paid good money for my book and now don't want it on their shelves.


I was surprised by his candor. Jonah had insisted on our hike that if he did decide to give me an interview the one off-limit topic would be the shame. It was too private and personal, he said. But by the next sentence, it became dear that the shame was something he intended to deal with as hurriedly as possible on the way to something else. This was, it quickly became dear, an apology speech like no other. He was going to explain his flaws within the context of neuroscience. It was a Jonah Lehrer keynote speech on the unique flaws of smart people like Jonah Lehrer. He began comparing himself to inadvertently imperfect scientists working at the FBI forensics lab. Innocent people had been convicted of terrorism because brilliant FBI scientists were "victims of their hidden brain, undone by flaws so deep-seated they don't even notice their existence."

He gave an example-an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was falsely accused by the FBI of committing the Madrid bombings of March 2004. A fingerprint had been lifted from a bag of detonators found at the scene. After the FBI fed it into their database, Mayfield's name came back as a match.

The detectives soon discovered that Mayfield was a Muslim, married to an Egyptian immigrant, and had represented a convicted terrorist in a child custody dispute.


The FBI held Mayfield for two weeks before acknowledging that the fingerprint match was "not even close." In fact, the agency had fallen victim to something known as confirmation bias. It was taking seriously only those pieces of information that confirmed the preexisting belief that Mayfield was the culprit. It was unconsciously filtering out evidence that pointed to his innocence. As a result of the scandal, the FBI implemented rigorous new reforms to root out errors. It would be great-Jonah ended his speech by saying-if something like that could happen with him.

If I'm lucky enough to write again, I won't write a thing that isn't fact-checked and fully footnoted. Because here is what I've learned: unless I'm willing to continually grapple with my failings-until I'm forced to fix my first draft, and deal with criticism of the second, and submit the final for a good, independent scrubbing-I won't create anything worth keeping around.

This was the happy ending Jonah believed Americans wanted. As I sat on the plane, I realized I had no idea if his speech was good or bad, or if it would go down poorly or well. The FBI stuff was overly tangential and evasive. Jonah wasn't really like the FBI. As it happens, I've done my own research on the perils of confirmation bias and agree with Jonah that it is a powerful bias indeed, often found at the heart of miscarriages of justice. In fact, ever since I first learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere. Everywhere. But even a confirmation bias aficionado like me could see that Jonah hadn't succumbed to it. Deliberately padding out Bob Dylan quotes to fit a thesis about the creative process wasn't confirmation bias.

So I found the FBI digression a bit slippery, but there was still a good chance his speech could be like the end of Neil Diamond's The Jazz Singer, where the disgraced synagogue cantor wins over the congregation by reminding them how beautiful his singing voice is. I e-mailed Jonah to say I thought his speech was fantastic. He sent me an appreciative reply. I asked him if I could come with him to Miami. He said no.

***

I am the author of a book on creativity that ... contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes ... I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan.


Jonah was at the Knight Foundation lectern, standing very still. I was watching at home on my computer. In his old lucrative public-speaking days, his voice would rise and fall to emphasize this word or that, but now he sounded flat, like a scared child in front of the class. This was the most important speech of his life. He was begging for a second chance. If things weren't stressful enough for him, the Knight Foundation had decided to erect a giant screen behind his head that displayed a live Twitter feed. Anyone watching from home could tweet their ongoing opinion of Jonah's request for forgiveness using the hashtag #infoneeds and their comment would automatically appear, in real time and in gigantic letters, right next to Jonah's face. A second screen was positioned within his sightline.

I saw Jonah's eyes flicker to it.

Wow. Jonah Lehrer talk dives directly into a listing of failures, errors and mea culpa.

And that, people, is how you apologize.


During the preceding seven months, Jonah had been disgraced and ridiculed and cast out. He had shuffled along the canyons of Los Angeles in a never-ending sweat of guilt and shame, a constant clenched pain. And now, suddenly, there was light. I felt as if I were witnessing a kind of miracle. Just like with my spambot men, we knew when to shame and when to stop. It was as if we instinctively understood that Jonah's punishment had reached an appropriate peak and now it was time to listen to what he had to say.

And then Jonah moved on to the FBI analogy.

***

I'd like to tell you a story that has given me a little hope. It's a story about a mistake and how it was fixed. It's a story that I was working on at the time my career fell apart. The story is about forensic science.


It quickly became extremely clear to Jonah, and to me watching at home, that the audience had no interest in his opinions on forensic science. Perhaps they would have had at some point in his career. But not anymore.

Jonah Lehrer boring people into forgiving him for his plagiarism.

I am not feeling terribly convinced by the deadpan mea culpa droning on by @JonahLehrer.

I can't handle watching the @JonahLehrer apology. He is boring and unconvincing. Time for something else.


Jonah carried on. He talked of how, a month before he resigned from his job, he interviewed the behavioral economist Dan Ariely on the subject of how "the human mind is a confabulation machine."

"The human mind is a confabulation machine." Now 'that's' passing the buck.

Using shoddy Pop-psych to explain inability to even write shoddy Pop-psych from scratch.

Jonah Lehrer is a friggin' sociopath.


Trapped at the lectern, Jonah had twenty minutes of his speech to go, followed by the Q&A.

I agreed with the tweeter who wrote that Jonah was passing the buck when he said that the human mind was "a confabulation machine." But by mid-apology, it seemed irrelevant whether the criticisms had legitimacy. They were cascading into his sightline in a torrent. Jonah was being told in the most visceral, instantaneous way that there was no forgiveness for him, no possibility of reentry.

The only way @JonahLehrer can redeem himself from his failures is by doing completely different work. He is tainted as a writer forever.

I have zero inclination to forgive or read his future work.

Rantings of a Delusional. Unrepentant Narcissist.

Jonah Lehrer's speech should be titled "Recognizing self-deluded assholes and how to avoid them in the future."


Still, he was forced to continue. He had no choice. He had to reach the end. He flatly intoned that he hoped that one day, "when I tell my young daughter the same story I've just told you, I will be a better person because of it. More humble."

Wait, Jonah Lehrer is speaking at a journalism conference? Did they run out of people who aren't frauds with interesting stuff to say?

Jonah Lehrer putting on a great demonstration of the emptiness of pop behavior-psych: a moral defective tries to blame cognitive failure.

He has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.


Power shifts fast. Jonah was being punished on Twitter because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but he was on the floor then, and people were still kicking, and congratulating themselves for punching up.

The speech ended with a polite round of applause from the people in the same room as he was.

Amid the tidal wave of abuse, there had been some calls for humanity, a few tweeters noting the terrible strangeness of what was unfolding.

Ugh, Jonah Lehrer is apologizing next to a live Twitter feed of people mocking him. It's basically a 21st century town square flogging.

Jonah Lehrer is a real person. Twitter is making me so uncomfortable right now.

Jonah Lehrer's crimes are significant, but apologizing in front of a giant-screen Twitter feed seems cruel and unusual punishment.


But all that was wiped away when someone tweeted: Did Lehrer get paid to be there today?

Of course he didn't, I thought.

And then Knight answered that question.

Jonah Lehrer was paid $20K to speak about plagiarism at Knight lunch.

Wish I could get paid $20,000 to say that I'm a lying dirtbag.


And so on, until late that evening, when this tweet arrived.

Journalism foundation apologizes for paying $20,000 to disgraced author Jonah Lehrer.


Jonah e-mailed. "Today was really awful. I'm filled with all sorts of regret."

I sent him a sympathetic reply. I said I thought he should donate the $20,000 to charity.

"Nothing can turn this around," he replied. ''I've got to be realistic about that. I shouldn't have accepted the invitation to speak, but now it's too late."

***

Fuck off, you can't even do your apology without slotting it into some stupid Jonah framework," Michael Moynihan said to me over lunch at Cookshop in New York City. Michael shook his head in wonder. "That wasn't an apology. It was a string of Gladwellian bullshit. He was on autopilot. He was a robot: 'Let me get this study from some academic.' All the words he used to describe his dishonesty. It was like a thesaurus had landed on his head." Michael paused. "Oh!" he said. "Someone sent me a text. I thought he was reading way too much into it. But he pointed out to me that Jonah said, 'I lied to a journalist CALLED Michael Moynihan.' I love that. I said, 'Yeah. I see what you're saying.' He didn't lie to 'journalist Michael Moynihan.' That's the great trick of the language. 'A journalist CALLED Michael Moynihan.' 'Who's this fucking schlub?'''

Michael took a bite of his steak. The fact was, his was a great scoop. It was great journalism, and what did Michael get from it? Some congratulatory tweets, which probably give you a bit of a dopamine rush or something, but otherwise nothing: $2,200 plus a veiled insult from Jonah if Michael and his friend weren't being paranoid about that part.

Michael shook his head. "Nothing came out of this for me," he said.

In fact, it was worse than nothing. Michael had noticed that people were starting to feel scared of him. Fellow journalists. A few days before our lunch, some panicked writer-someone Michael barely knew-had confessed out of the blue that a biography he'd written might have inadvertently veered into plagiarism.

"Like I adjudicate these things," said Michael.

Whether Michael liked it or not, there was fear in the air now because of what had happened to Jonah. But Michael didn't want to be some witchfinder general, roaming the countryside with writers blurting out declarations of guilt to him, begging his forgiveness for crimes he hadn't known they'd committed.

"You turn around and you suddenly realize you're the head of a pitchfork mob," Michael said. "And it's 'What are these people fucking doing here? Why are they acting like heathens? I don't want to be associated with this at all. I want to get out of here.' "

"It was horrible," I said. "All this time I'd been thinking we were in the middle of some kind of idealistic reimagining of the justice system. But those people were so cold."

The response to Jonah's apology had been brutal and confusing to me. It felt as if the people on Twitter had been invited to be characters in a courtroom drama, and had been allowed to choose their roles, and had all gone for the part of the hanging judge. Or it was even worse than that. They all had gone for the part of the people in the lithographs being ribald at whippings.

"I'm watching people stabbing and stabbing and stabbing Jonah," Michael said, "and I'm, 'HE'S DEAD.'''

***

The next day I drove from New York to Boston to visit the Massachusetts Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Given how vicious the resurgence of public shaming had suddenly turned, I wondered why that type of punishment had been phased out in the nineteenth century. I had assumed-like most people do, I think-that this demise was due to the migration from villages to cities. Shame became ineffectual because pilloried people could lose themselves in the anonymous crowd as soon as the chastisement was over. Shame had lost its power to shame. That was my assumption. Was it right?

I parked my car outside the Massachusetts Archives, a slablike Brutalist building on the waterfront near the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Inside were the microfilms that preserve early legal documents handwritten by the Puritan settlers. I took my seat at a microfilm reader and began to carefully scroll through them. For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers. The spindly words swirled on the fraying pages. They really should have spent more time on paragraph breaks back then and less time on the letter f I began to speed up, scrolling unprofessionally, decades passing before me in seconds, until I suddenly found myself face-to-face with an early American shaming.

It was July 15, 1742. A woman named Abigail Gilpin, her husband at sea, was found "naked in bed with one John Russell." They were both to be "whipped at the public whipping post twenty stripes each." Abigail was not appealing the whipping itself, but was begging the judge to "let me have my punishment before the people are stirring. If your honor pleases, take some pity on me for my dear children, who cannot help their mother's unfortunate failings."

The documents don't reveal whether the judge consented, but straight after that, I found a transcript of a sermon that offered a clue as to why she might have pled for a private whipping. The sermon, by the Reverend Nathan Strong of Hartford, Connecticut, was an entreaty to people to be less exuberant at executions: "Do not go to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in its most awful form, is there ... The person who can go and look on death merely to gratify an idle humor is destitute both of humanity and piety."

After lunch, I traveled the few miles to the Massachusetts Historical Society, a grand old townhouse on Boylston Street. I remembered something Jonah had e-mailed me before I flew to Los Angeles: "The shaming process is fucking brutal." I thought about the phrase "shaming process." It was probably reassuring for a shamee to envisage their punishment as a process rather than a free-for-all. If you're being destroyed, you want to feel that the people tearing you apart at least know what they're doing. Well, maybe less delicate shamees wouldn't care how orderly their shaming was, but Jonah struck me as someone for whom structure was important and someone who had only ever wanted to impress people and fit in.

It turned out that public shaming had once been a process. A book of Delaware laws I discovered at the Massachusetts Historical Society revealed that if Jonah had been found guilty of "lying or publishing false news" in the 1800s, he would have been "fined, placed in the stocks for a period not exceeding four hours, or publicly whipped with not more than forty stripes." If the judge had chosen a whipping, local newspapers would have published a digest detailing the amount of squirming that had occurred. "Rash and Hayden squirmed considerably during the performance, and their backs were well-scarred," wrote the Delawarean of an 1876 whipping. If Jonah's whipper had been deemed to have not whipped hard enough, the reviews would have been scathing. "Suppressed remarks were expressed by large numbers. Many were heard to say that the punishment was a farce. Drunken fights and rows followed in rapid succession," reported Delaware's Wilmington Daily Commercial after a disappointing 1873 whipping.

The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they'd been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor through the city crowds like some volunteer scarlet letter. But at the archives I found no evidence that public shaming fell out of fashion as a result of newfound anonymity. I did, however, find plenty of people from centuries past bemoaning its out sized cruelty, warning that well-meaning people, in a crowd, often take it too far. But according to the documents I found, that wasn't it at all. They didn't fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal.

The movement against public shaming was already in full flow in March 1787 when Benjamin Rush, a United States founding father, wrote a paper calling for their outlawing -- the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot.

Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth up on any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error.

-- BENJAMIN RUSH, "AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS UPON CRIMINALS, AND UPON SOCIETY," MARCH 9, 1787


In case you consider Rush too much of a bleeding-heart liberal, it's worth pointing out that his proposition for alternatives to public shaming included taking the criminal into a private room-away from the public gaze-and administering "bodily pain."

To ascertain the nature, degrees, and duration of the bodily pain will require some knowledge of the principles of sensation and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system.


Public punishments were abolished within fifty years of Rush's paper, with only Delaware weirdly holding out until 1952 (which is why the Delaware whipping critiques I excerpt were published in the 1870s).

The New York Times, baffled by Delaware's obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial.

If it had previously existed in [the convicted person's) bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses. The boy of eighteen who is whipped at New Castle [a Delaware whipping post] for larceny is in nine cases out of ten ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows.

-- QUOTED IN ROBERT GRAHAM CALDWELL, Red Hannah: Delaware's Whipping Post


As Jonah Lehrer stood in front of that giant-screen Twitter feed on February 12, 2013, he experienced something that had been widely considered appalling in the eighteenth century.

I left the Massachusetts Historical Society, took out my phone, and asked Twitter, "Has Twitter become a kangaroo court?"

"Not a kangaroo court," someone replied quite tersely. "Twitter still can't impose real sentences. Just commentary. Only unlike you, Jon, we aren't paid for it."

Was he right? It felt like a question that really needed answering because it didn't seem to be crossing any of our minds to wonder whether the person we had just shamed was okay or in ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Lehrer's intention in submitting himself to a public grilling was to show the world that he's ready to return to journalism, that we can trust him because he knows now not to trust himself. All he proved is that he's not wired like the rest of us. If he can figure out why that is, that would be a neuroscience story worth publishing.

-- JEFF BERCOVICI. Forbes, FEBRUARY 12, 2013


I've been banging the drum for Lehrer to quiet his detractors and bank some goodwill by donating that $20,000 to charity ... Finally, I managed to get him on the phone this afternoon. ''I'm not interested in commenting," he told me. Could he at least say whether he planned to keep the money? "I read your article. I have nothing to say to you," he said, before hanging up.

-- JEFF BERCOVICI, Forbes. FEBRUARY 13, 2013


''I'm still not entirely sure what I can give you .. " Jonah was talking to me on the phone from his home in Los Angeles.

"The twenty thousand dollars ... " I said.

"It was absolutely a mistake," he said. "I didn't ask for it. It was offered. They just gave it to me. I mean, what else do you want? I ... " Jonah paused. "Look, I got bills to pay. I haven't earned a penny in seven months. I was flying high, I was making lots of money. And all of a sudden you're making no money."

Jonah had finally agreed to a lengthier interview. He sounded exhausted, like he'd been inside some spinning machine designed by aliens to test the effects of stress on humans. For a smart man, everything he'd done from the moment Michael first e-mailed him had been a giant miscalculation. He'd been like a popped balloon shooting wildly in all directions, lying frantically to Michael before slumping, the air all gone, in the middle of one of the most terrible shamings of our time.

"A friend forwarded me a blog post by Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago," Jonah said. "An eminent guy, I interviewed him on occasion. He wrote a blog post about me where he called me a sociopath."

I sense that Lehrer is a bit of a sociopath. Yes, shows of contrition are often phony, meant to convince a gullible public (as in Lance Armstrong's case) that they're good to go again. But Lehrer can't even be bothered to fake an apology that sounds meaningful. Call me uncharitable, but if I were a magazine editor, I'd never hire him.

-- JERRY COYNE, QUOTED ON RICHARDBOWKER.COM, FEBRUARY 18, 2013


"I thought of you," Jonah said. "I thought, That's an interesting question for Jon. Jon's spent some time with me. Maybe I am a sociopath."

The question didn't surprise me. Ever since I published a book about psychopaths, people have been asking me if they're one (or, if not them, their boss or their ex-boyfriend or Lance Armstrong). Perhaps Jonah was honestly intrigued by the possibility that he was one, but I didn't think so. I think he knew he wasn't, and he had a different reason for wanting to have this conversation. Academics shouldn't diagnose people from afar as sociopaths. It was a stupid thing for Jerry Coyne to have done. I think Jonah wanted us to bitch about his stupidity for a moment. It would be a way for him to recover some self-esteem-to do a bit of shaming of someone else. Jonah was at rock bottom, so I was happy to go along with it. I told Jonah that he didn't seem like someone who had no conscience.

"Who the hell knows what a conscience is," Jonah replied. "If a conscience is living in a world defined by regrets, then, yeah, I've got a conscience. My very first thought every morning is what I've done wrong. That sounds self-pitying and I'd like you not to use that quote, but there's no other way around it."

"If it felt really important to use that quote, could I?" I asked him.

Jonah sighed. "I mean, it depends how you use it, but I'd prefer you not use it," he replied.

I use the quote here because it seems important, given that so many people imagine Jonah has some neurological lack of conscience.

"Regrets of the sort I have are all-consuming," Jonah continued. "I think about what I've done to the people I loved. What I've put my wife through. What I've put my brother through. What I've put my parents through. That is haunting. Long after I get over the loss of my status, and the loss of my career, which I enjoyed, I will never ... Life is short. And I have caused tremendous pain to the people I love. I don't know what that feeling's called. Remorse sounds about right. There's a tremendous amount of remorse. And as time passes, that isn't going away. It is miserable and haunting."

I heard Jonah's daughter crying in the background. We talked about the "slippery slope" that led to the fake Dylan quotes. It began with the self-plagiarism-with Jonah reusing his own paragraphs in different stories. I told him I didn't consider that the crime of the century. "Frank Sinatra doesn't only sing 'My Way' once," I said.

"The self-plagiarism should have been a warning sign," Jonah said. "It should have been a sign that I was stretched. If I needed to recycle my own material, why was I bothering to write this blog post in the first place? Look, we can debate the ethics of it. And I've certainly heard lots of debate about this. But at the time I didn't think it was wrong. If I'd thought it was wrong, I would have taken some trouble to hide my tracks." He paused. "It should have been a huge flashing neon sign telling me, 'You are getting careless.' You're taking shortcuts and not noticing, and shortcuts become habits, and you excuse them because you're too busy. I wasn't turning anything down."

"What would have been wrong with turning things down?" I asked.

"It was some toxic mixture of insecurity and ambition," said Jonah. "I always felt like a fad. I felt like I was going to be hot for a second and then I would disappear. So I had to act while I could. And there was just some deep-seated . . . I sound like I'm on a couch with my shrink ... some very dangerous and reckless ambition. You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things. And then one day you get an e-mail saying there's these four [six] Dylan quotes, and they can't be explained, and they can't be found anywhere else, and you realize you made them up in your book proposal three years before, and you were too lazy, too stupid, to ever check. I can only wish, and I wish this profoundly, I'd had the temerity, the courage, to do a fact check on my last book. But as anyone who does a fact check knows, they're not particularly fun things to go through. Your story gets a little flatter. You're forced to grapple with all your mistakes, conscious and unconscious ... "

"So you forgot that the fake quotes were in the book?" I asked Jonah.

"Porget gets me off the hook too easily," he replied. "I didn't want to remember. So I made no effort to. I wrote well. So why check?"

"So you were sloppy?"

"I don't want to just blame sloppiness," he said. "It was sloppiness and deception. Sloppiness and lies. I lied to cover up the sloppiness."

I'd been thinking that when I told Jonah his speech was fantastic it was probably a bad steer. In truth, I'd needed to read it three or four times on the plane because the words kept swirling around on the page, and I didn't know whether that was a reflection of attention deficiency on my part or abstruse phrasing on Jonah's. But like all journalists, I really love a scoop-a scoop keeps at bay the scream of failure-and I thought that telling him it was fantastic was my best chance of winning the interview.

"I worked really hard on it," Jonah said. "I was looking at the Twitter stream during it and the things people were saying ... Some people saw the FBI analogies as the worst possible thing in the world. But that's not some deceptive trick. That's the way I make sense of the world. That's how I think. Clearly it was a mistake. But ... "

"That Twitter stream!" I said.

"I was trying to apologize, and to see the response to it live ... I didn't know if I was going to get through that. I had to turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to shutdown."

"What are the tweets you remember most?"

"It wasn't the totally off-the-wall cruel ones, because those are so easy to discount," he said. "It's the ones that mixed in a little tenderness with the shiv."

"Like what?"

"I don't want to ... "

Jonah said he couldn't judge why people "got so mad" about his apology. I said I thought it was because it sounded too much like a Jonah Lehrer speech from the old days. People wanted to see him altered somehow. His not being overtly cowed gave the audience permission to envisage him dramatically, a monster immune to shame.

"They didn't want you to intellectualize it," I said. "They wanted you to be emotional. If you'd been more emotional, they'd have gone for it more."

Jonah sighed. "That may have been a better strategy," he said. "But it wasn't a strategy I wanted to rehearse onstage. It was not something I wanted to share with the universe, with everyone on Twitter. I didn't want to talk about how this had ruined me. That's something for me to deal with, and for my loved ones to help me through. But that's not something I wanted to get up onstage in front of the Internet and talk about."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Oh, gosh, I don't know," said Jonah. "Could you do that?"

"Yes," I said. "I think I could. And I think that would mean I'd survive better than you."

"So what would Jon Ronson's apology speech be?" Jonah said. "What would you say?"

"Right," I said. "I'd say okay ... I ... Hello. I'm Jon Ronson and I want to apologize for " What would I say? I cleared my throat. "I just want everyone to know that I'm really upset ... "

Jonah was listening patiently on the line. I stopped. Even though I was just play-acting, I felt wiped out. And I hadn't really even got anywhere in my attempt.

"What happened to you is my worst nightmare," I said. "Yeah," Jonah replied. "It was mine too."

***

Four more months passed. The winter became the early summer. Then, unexpectedly, Andrew Wylie began shopping a new Jonah Lehrer book proposal around New York City's publishers. A Book About Love. The proposal was immediately leaked to The New York Times. In it Jonah described the moment he felt "the shiver of a voice mail message."

I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I start to cry. Why was I crying? I had been caught in a lie, a desperate attempt to conceal my mistakes. And now it was clear that, within 24 hours, my fall would begin. I would lose my job and my reputation. My private shame would become public.


Jonah then described leaving St. Louis and returning to Los Angeles, his suit and shirt "stained with sweat and vomit."

I open the front door and take off my dirty shirt and weep on the shoulder of my wife. My wife is caring but confused: How the hell could I be so reckless? I have no good answers.

-- JONAH LEHRER'S BOOK PROPOSAL, AS LEAKED TO The New York Times, JUNE 6, 2013


The New York media community declared itself resolutely indifferent to Jonah's suffering. "'Recycling bin' is a hilarious choice of detail for the compulsive plagiarist," wrote Gawker's Tom Scocca. "And, obviously: Bring us two witnesses who saw you puke when and where you claim you puked. Or don't bother."

And then, to my amazement, Slate's Daniel Engber announced that he had spent a day combing through Jonah's proposal and believed he had uncovered plagiarism within it.

Surely Jonah hadn't been that insanely reckless?

When I read Engber's article closer, things didn't seem quite so clear-cut. "A chapter on the secret to having a happy marriage," Engber writes, "comes close to copying a recent essay on the same subject by Adam Gopnik, Lehrer's onetime colleague at The New Yorker."

Gopnik: In 1838, when Darwin was first thinking of marriage, he made an irresistible series of notes on the subject-a scientific-seeming list of marriage pros and cons ... In favor of marriage, he included the acquisition of a "constant companion and friend in old age" and, memorably and conclusively, decided that a wife would be "better than a dog, anyhow."

Lehrer: In July 1838,Charles Darwin considered the possibility of marriage in his scientific notebook. His thoughts quickly took the shape of a list, a balance sheet of reasons to "marry" and "not marry." The pros of wedlock were straightforward: Darwin cited the possibility of children ("if it please God"), the health benefits of attachment and the pleasure of having a "constant companion (& friend in old age)." A wife, he wrote, was probably "better than a dog anyhow."

Gopnik: And the Darwins went on to have something close to an ideal marriage.

Lehrer: This might seem like an inauspicious start to a relationship, but the Darwins went on to have a nearly ideal marriage.


And so on, for a few paragraphs. Engber wasn't totally sure this counted as plagiarism, "or if [Lehrer] modified his words to stop just short of doing so." Or maybe both men had drawn from the same source: "In the footnotes Lehrer cites page 661 of Desmond and Moore's 1991 biography of Darwin. Anyone who has a copy of that book is invited to check the wordings."

But even if it wasn't plagiarism, Engber was "convinced that Lehrer hasn't changed his ways at all. He's set his course as clearly as can be. He'll recycle and repeat, he'll puke his gritty guts out."

No matter what transgressions Jonah had or hadn't committed-it seemed to me-he couldn't win. But his Book About Love is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster around the same time that this book will appear, so we'll all learn at once if it will win him some redemption.

Four: God That Was Awesome

During the months that followed, it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred or so followers. I'd meet them in restaurants and airport cafes-spectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the business wear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity that it didn't even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier when, passing through Heathrow Airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.
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