Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

May 10, 1940, was the day Winston Churchill formally replaced Neville Chamberlain at 10 Downing Street. The illustration here is of Chamberlain. It was not the end of a war. It was not even the beginning of the end. But it was the end of the beginning.   https://www.onthisday.com/day/may/10

I mentioned in a couple of posts here in early March that Jill Abramson had written a book, Merchants of Truth, about where the news publishing business is headed, that there is valuable material in the book, and that it had become embroiled in a controversy over plagiarism. This post follows up on the third of those points. One of the sources whence came the cribbed passages at issue is Jake Malooley, who wrote a piece years ago about Jason Mojica, a Vice News editor. The plagiarism from that piece was in fact one of the items I cited in my discussion in March. Malooly has since had the opportunity to interview Abramson on this point. He hears her out on her apology to him, but then presses her beyond her comfort zone, in a piece run by Rolling Stone. Here is part of the exchange. Isn’t inadvertent plagiarism still plagiarism? No, it isn’t. I mean, you can consult your own experts. It may be that not all agree with me, but I’ve talked to a number of respected eminent sc...

Although I think the general argument Jill Abramson sets forth in her book, as compressed in yesterday's entry, is valuable and perhaps in the end sound, I have to include here the unhappy truth that Abramson is an unfortunate bearer of that message. Her book, Merchants of Truth, contains some glaring instances of plagiarism. This comes especially in the section of the book devoted to the news website Vice News , seen by some (by not by JA) as a wave-of-the-future institution. Back in the late spring of 2005, the Ryerson Review of Journalism carried a piece by Nicolle Weeks, headlined "Bigot or Champion of Truth?" Weeks argued that Vice is much more the former than the latter.  She says this, about the website's co-founder Gavin McInnes: In August 2003, McInnes wrote a column in  The American Conservative , a magazine run by Pat Buchanan. In the magazine, he called young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often) who...

Ah, a subject about which I could get nostalgic. Well, I can get nostalgic about facing a due paper's deadline and wondering about a shortcut.... Of course, when I was a denizen of higher education, one found "ghost writers" through word of mouth, corkboards, and the classified ads. We didn't have this internet thingy going for us in the late 1970s and early 80s. And, no, I never succumbed to the temptation. Anyway, here is a link to the quality-checking piece that has me so nostalgic: http://en.writecheck.com/blog/2013/08/13/testing-ghostwriters-why-cheaters-still-dont-prosper

Discussing the late sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison a couple of weeks ago got me to thinking about one of the best known facts about his life, one which may not be true at all. The fact, or factoid, is: The Schwarzenegger movie, Terminator, was plagiarized from a scenario that Ellison wrote for the television program Outer Limits. If anyone ever tells you this, they'll probably tell it in the tone of someone retailing a deep dark secret. Something that was hushed up, but that the cognoscenti are aware of nonetheless. If this ever happens to you, please answer: "Oh, really? Which episode was that?" The truth is that Ellison wrote two such scenarios, both variations of the same general idea but very different from each other. Terminator is generally described as a rip-off of one. Or the other. Or it doesn't really matter. But it does matter. Because one is not entitled to a property interest in one's broad thematic ideas. Neither Ellison nor anyone else eve...

Well, this happened more than a year ago, but I'm only now finding out about it. In case I'm not literally the last to know, I'll proceed. On August 2016, as the Rio games were about to start, and on the recommendation of its ethics committee, the International Olympic Committee suspended one member, Moon Dae-sung (of South Korea) after it emerged that his Ph.D. thesis was largely plagiarized. The thesis, submitted to Kookmin University, was on the physiology of taekwondo, specifically on "Effect of Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) on Flexibility and Isokinetic Muscle Strength in Taekwondo Player." Somehow I am reminded of Bill Cosby, who became Dr. Cosby on the strength of a dissertation on the use of "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" as a teaching tool. Moon won a gold medal as a taekwondo athlete at the Athens Olympics in 2004. I suppose it is good that people who are rich and famous for something non-cerebral want to be able ...

The latest plagiarism charge in the circles of the powerful involves Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke is apparently about to trade the rather humble seeming title of "sheriff" (heck, like Andy Taylor? let's go ask Aunt Bea nice for some pie...) for the more exalted title of Asst Secretary, Department of Homeland Security. He was an important Trump surrogate during the 2016 campaign, and the new job feels like job-well-done reward. The work in question is a master's thesis Clarke submitted on 2013 to the Naval PostGraduate School. One can read the whole thesis here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170521040645/https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3727893-13Sep-Clarke-David.html The subject is "Making U.S. Security and Privacy Rights Compatible." One can see a list of the unattributed use of sources here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170521000653/http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/05/politics/sheriff-clarke-plagiarism/

The new administration is already notorious for one high-profile example of this: our new first lady used without attribution a passage from a speech once given by her precursor as FLOTUS. Now, though, another example has popped up. Plagiarism may yet become a theme of the coverage of the dreary years to come. It is not the gravest of sins, but it may be a valuable symptom of what people do and don't consider important. The POTUS-elect has named Monica Crowley, of Fox News, as director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. This appointment reminded people that Crowley is the author of a book, one with a cutesy title at that: What the (Bleep) Just Happened (2012). CNN's KFile looked carefully at that book and found 50 examples of word-for-word copying, many of them quite extensive passages. Here's one example. From the book, a passage criticizing Nancy Pelosi: She also said that she was only briefed once—in September 2...

Jonah Lehrer has written a book about love. In case the name of the author rings a bell, but you aren't quite sure why ... that is THIS fellow. Lehrer was a high-flying pop-science pundit over a five year period, from 2007 until 2012. He wrote a series of books with such titles as Proust Was A Neuroscientist with a lot of specific messages but with the over-arching meta-messages that Neuroscience is Wonderful and Explains Everything about Us. The link I provided you above takes you to a blog entry I posted here in August 2012, amidst Lehrer's fall from grace. The specific cause was a lot of crap he wrote about Dylan. But, as is often the case in these scandals, once some blood is in the water other sharks arrive, and other chunks of flesh are torn away from the reputational body. In this case, the "sharks" weren't doing anything more predatory than fact checking, and source checking. Which turned out to be quite predatory indeed for Lehrer. For example: W...

In July, I wrote here about public exposure of the plagiarism of Matthew Whitaker, which that month led to Whitaker's demotion from full professor to associate professor. Whitaker had been a rising star in the world of Black Studies, for example as the author of PEACE BE STILL, a history of African-Americans since 1945. But large chunks of that book turn out to come from such unacknowledged sources as the Archive of American Television. I quoted the AAT lifting last time I discussed this case. Another quite blatant example involves an edited collection of writings on African American Icons of Sports . Whitaker was the editor. As is the case with many editors of such works, he also included some work of his own. Or that he presented as his own, anyway. And that material came largely from wikipedia. Plagiarizing from such a widely used and easily accessible source just seems stupid but, hey, it's done. The new news: Whitaker isn't going to get away with a mere demotio...

The always-unpleasant spotlight on public exposure of plagiarism falls now on Matthew Whitaker, formerly a professo r at Arizona State University.  No, that isn't Whitaker pictured here. That's Sherman Helmsley as George Jefferson. More on Jefferson in a bit. An anonymous blogger, one with a laser-like focus on the issue of plagiarism, brought the matter of the plagiarized passages in a book 'authored' by Whitaker to the public's attention and, now that Whitaker has been demoted from full professor to associate professor, that blogger is taking a bow . One neat twist on this case: Whitaker had parlayed his academic prominence into a role with the City of Phoenix, AZ. He was supposed to help train that city's police officers to be culturally sensitive as they do their jobs. That contract is now at an end. The text in question is a history of "modern Black America" from the second world war to the presidency of Barack Obama, with the evocative...

The January issue of Harper's contains an article on the late Pablo Neruda, by Emily Witt. My own highly selective take away from the article is its reference to a plagiarism scandal I had never heard of. Apparently, "Poem 16" of Neruda's work, "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" are "lifted almost verbatim from the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore," Witt says. There was apparently quite a fuss over this back in the 1930s. Twenty Love Poems, published in 1924, is the work that made Neruda famous. So I gather the plagiarism too a few years coming to light. I've only vaguely heard of Tagore. But I've given you his image above, thanks to the wonders of googling. I think I should look into this matter some more.

Raphael Golb, pictured here, son of Normal Golb (see yesterday's discussion of who he is) is expected to surrender to authorities on Tuesday, July 22 to begin serving his sentence. This is despite a victory at the Court of Appeals, which discarded the felony charge against him, identity theft, and declared unconstitutional the New York statute on "aggravated harassment." I'm glad of his victories, by the way. When such offenses are on the books they render possible the criminalization of vigorous and free-wheeling debate on the sort of issues that the first amendment was, precisely, designed to protect. That left misdemeanor charges of forgery and impersonation still standing. Golb took part in internet debates about the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the issues on which his father has made a reputation. Not surprisingly, Norman Golb's thesis on this point has been hotly contested, by (among others) Lawrence Schiffman, of New York University. In the wak...

I don't know what lessons to draw from this. But there are some wrecks on the street that I simply must inspect. Since I am scrupulous about revealing my own sources, I will start with that. I learned of the below weird bit of plagiarism only quite recently, from Felix Salmon's column at Reuters .  (Yes, that entry is actually by Ben Walsh, but the column as a whole has Felix' name on it.) It appears that an ESPN.com columnist, Lynn Hoppes, has been engaging in blatant plagiarism. From wikipedia no less.  (Gee, that's such an obscure site! who would ever know???) Isaac Rauch, of DeadSpin, called out Hoppes on this back in July . In case you don't want to follow that link, here are a couple of Rauch's examples: Wikipedia on boxing great and rape ex-con Mike Tyson: "Tyson is a former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and holds the record as the youngest boxer to win the WBC, WBA, and IBF heavyweight titles at 20 years, 4 months and 22 d...