on Lehrer and Zakaria crashing and burning

In case you haven't been following the stories, in a nutshell:

Wunderkid builds an astonishingly successful career by writing gripping and comprehensible accounts of contemporary neuroscience. In a handful of years, he goes from writing a blog to being hired as a staff writer by the New Yorker. But as his star rises, Jonah Lehrer starts recycling old content of his and repackaging it as new work: then someone looks at his most recent books and realizes he's been making up Bob Dylan quotes. No more New Yorker staff position.

Indian-American editor becomes a widely-respected pundit and opinion writer, shaping the national conversation on foreign affairs through his numerous columns, TV appearances and other media engagements. He was the editor of Newsweek, is currently one of the faces of CNN and Time Magazine, and is regarded as a consistently informed voice of reason. But in Fareed Zakaria's most recent Time column, an entire paragraph was lifted almost word-for-word from a New Yorker piece by Jill Lepore. After a brief hiatus, and other claims of plagiarism that have been debunked, he's been reinstated by Time and CNN.

Now, it's not surprising that people are lazy and unethical. I mean, hello, have you met humanity? It's not surprising that successful and well-respected individuals would make profound moral errors. Or that they would fail on a professional level: after all, this isn't a political scandal, where the moral lapse is often peripheral to the life's work. This is an indictment of both personal ethics and professional ability, and throws a whole body of writing into question.

And unfortunately, it's not surprising to see respected journalists thoroughly discredited: I wish it were, because trustworthiness is about the only capital professional journalists have left, and these high-profile embarrassments are very bad for business. But, alas, it's not surprising at all.

But in two other ways, these cases are downright shocking.

First, both Lehrer and Zakaria failed so dramatically at the kinds of tasks that are normally their biggest strengths. Lehrer's brilliance lay in taking the complicated facts of reality and making them into an approachable narrative. Complex truths were his bread and butter. Why on earth would he ever invent a simple, amateurish lie?

Zakaria had a distinctive voice and was renowned for his breadth of knowledge. He was virtuosic at expressing, in unique words, a well-informed position: yet he stole the words, the knowledge, and the opinion of another thinker.

It would have made more sense the other way around; if Lehrer, who often wrote about other people's research, had swiped some citations, and if Zakaria, fond of a well-placed snappy turn of phrase, had made up a quote when the right one didn't exist. That would be them falling victim to their weaknesses. But instead, their failures map perfectly onto their strengths.

And more fundamentally, I am a little shocked that they were both so phenomenally stupid. I mean, seriously: making up a BOB DYLAN quote? It's lazy, unethical and an absolute journalistic failure to make up a quote from Mildred Brown of Little Pebbletown, Florida. It's firecracker-up-your-butthole stupid to make up a quote from Bob Dylan.  That's like saying, "Oh, I'll make up the title of a Phish song," or "oh, I'll invent some details of this Civil War battle." What kind of idiot fabricates a fact when there's a massive community of people completely obsessed with the thing you're fudging?

(An internationally-famous Rhodes Scholar nonfiction author, that's what kind of idiot).

And Zakaria... really, did you think the readership of Time and the New Yorker contains no overlaps? That people interested in gun control would not read both your column and Lepore's article with close and careful attention? We live in the Google age, my friend. All you have to think is "huh, that sounds a little familiar," and the case is practically closed. There was no universe in which you would not get caught.

These are both men who were supposed to be smart. These are men defined by their intelligence, and rewarded richly for it, with money and prominent bylines and an opportunity to have an enormous impact on a nation's intellectual life. They have been Professionally Intelligent for YEARS.

How on earth could they possibly be so stupid?

the alluring hazards of apartment hunting

Apartment-hunting would be much less dangerous if I could turn my imagination off. But as it is, it’s draining. It’s exhausting. It’s terribly depressing.

With every Craiglist search I die a dozen tiny deaths. With every visit to Padmapper, during every afternoon spent scouring e-replicas of the Washington Post Classifieds, I build up another future life, and then watch as it crashes abruptly down.

Sometimes all it takes is an evocative detail, and I have it, fully formed: an image of a potential future, if only I could land that apartment.  A clawfoot bathtub. Yes, after another long, frustrating day, with another very short paycheck in the mail, I could come home and take a long soak, reading poetry and drinking wine in my clawfoot bathtub, readying myself for another day of crawling up the ladder.

This one’s got cheap rent, shabby carpets, and huge rooms with brightly-painted walls: I can see us passing out boxed wine at the cheerful parties in our orange-and-yellow living room.

And here, a third-story walk-up with a wrought-iron fence outside and a view of picturesque row houses, with skyscrapers on the horizon. From the photos it looks like you can see that window from the kitchen. I’d bake bread, looking out over the city as I kneaded dough, making ambitious weekend plans as the sloppy mess of flour and water coalesced beneath my fingers. I haven’t baked bread in ages, but if that was my kitchen window, things would definitely be different.

Others take longer to grow on me. I see the listing but can’t imagine how I could be happy there: it’s just an ancient, tiny, dimly-lit apartment. I shut the browers and walk away, but twenty minutes later I find myself thinking – it was only one block from an pub. I can see us out late, laughing with friends, rounding the corner from our pub, where the waitresses know our favorite beers. Turning on all the lamps in our humble, creaky apartment, until it is still tiny and creaky, but no longer dark: perfectly appropriate for broke but happy twenty-somethings, which is what we’d be if that was ours.

And then the listing vanishes, and just like that, it’s gone. That will never be my clawfoot tub, my living room wall, my kitchen view, my neighborhood pub. I will never be that ambitious bathtime poetry-reader, that party-throwing peoplepleaser, that bread-baker, that congenial craft beer enthusiast. Not there. Not like that.

Most of my dreams die slower deaths, or linger stubbornly on.  I have fantasies of an immediate future where I wake up every morning to go running, write every day, read the books I want to read, don’t waste any hours staring blankly at the wall and wishing I was someone else. Some mornings that future seems eminently achievable: some evenings it seems achieved. When it slips away from me, it never leaves forever.

Other dreams never grow sharp enough to die: they’re set years in the future, comfortably ambiguous, certainly unachievable in the moment. I don’t know how to realize them, so I can’t tell when they’ve passed irrevocably into impossibility.

But life in that apartment – it would be so manageable. I could pay that security deposit. I could sign that lease. If I could only get there in time, find the right one, beat everyone else to it, that could be mine. It’s so vivid, so close, so achievable.

They slip away, one after another. I wish I could leave my imagination out of this, or lock it in a small grey cage of modest expectations: a standard-issue shower, a view of gravel, in the middle of nowhere interesting. 

With no pleasant specifics to cling to, it would be no great loss to miss out on an apartment: I  could let each one pass with a shrug. My search would be disappointment-free.

But I can’t help it. My hopeful visions of the future are irrepressible. A single new listing and i’m off, building a new castle to destroy, exhausting myself in the process.

A 1920s double-oven gas stove. I’d start contributing to my old food blog for sure, just to take pictures with that in the background.

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2 skinny stories tall, hot pink on the outside, near a tattoo parlor. I think I’d make a fantastic hipster.

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Here’s one next to a froyo shop, which would probably become an addiction. I’d joke with all my friends that I kept them in business.  I’d be one of those cool young professonal women with a stylish wardrobe and a froyo habit and I’d take yoga at the

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And this one has a balcony I’d fill with pots of basil and oregano and carefully chosen flowers, and set up a chair so I could read by

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