Jonah Lehrer

BA, Columbia University

Jonah Lehrer was fast out of the gate. He studied neuroscience at Columbia, where for two years he was editor of the Columbia Review. After that, he was a 2003 Rhodes Scholar, and went to Wolfson College at Oxford, and th—

Hold on. Go back. What is the Columbia Review? Why, it’s the country’s oldest college literary magazine. And maybe that should have been a signal of the fictionalizing and creative writing to come.

Returning to the US, Lehrer decided he didn’t have what it took for a career in science. So he began a career as an explainer of science. And he was great at it. His first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, was a series of essays about famous people, published by the prestigious publishing house of Houghton Mifflin in 2007. Sure, it was smacked around by real scientists. But nonscientists lavished it with praise, and it became a best-seller.

Soon Lehrer was publishing in The New Yorker, Wired, Scientific American Mind, Nature, and other magazines. His specialty was neuroscience for the educated masses. And, since neuroscience was (and still is) the hot topic in psychological circles, Lehrer had carte blanche to write about any damn thing he wanted. He was good on radio. He was good on the lecture circuit. He was young, adorable, and happening. His next book, How We Decide, came out in 2009. It, too, became a best-seller.

Then, in 2012, writers for New York magazine and Slate discovered that Lehrer pieces often featured not just sentences but whole paragraphs that had been published elsewhere—by Jonah Lehrer. Yes, he was “self-plagiarizing”—or, to put it more delicately, “recycling” his material.

Is that so very wrong? Thriftily reusing writing that’s already yours, the better to keep up with a high-demand career? Well, it’s not illegal. But it is sort of cheat-y, especially to the magazines and websites that think they’re buying original writing, in order to please and delight their readers, who also think they’re being given original writing. Call it unethical. Still, there are worse writerly crimes. Like, e.g., transplanting text from press releases and calling it your own. And actually plagiarizing material from other people’s work. And conflating, misstating, or outright inventing quotations.

Lehrer was discovered to have been guilty of all these literary felonies. In March of 2012, Houghton published his Imagine: How Creativity Works. It was another best-seller. But Michael C. Moynihan, a reporter and an avid Bob Dylan fan, noticed something amiss in the book’s chapter on Dylan. The quotes didn’t sound right. And the more Moynihan pressed Lehrer for sourcing and confirmation, the more he got a runaround, evasions, contradictory explanations, and the like.

Moynihan published a damning piece in Tablet in late July 2012 detailing the whole story. When (four years later) he was interviewed by Matt Welch of Reason’s blog Hit and Run, Moynihan said that once Lehrer was caught having lied, he went off the record “to lie and lie and lie and lie to me these fantastical, brilliantly spun lies that I could never talk about. And I have never talked about them, because they were off the record.”

Then things got worse. Wired.com recruited journalism professor Charles Seife to examine Lehrer’s online oeuvre—and of the eighteen representative pieces Seife reviewed, seventeen had problems. Fourteen featured “recycling” of previous material. Five contained “press-release plagiarism.” Three contained outright plagiarism. Four had “quotation issues” and four had “factual issues.”

Houghton pulled Imagine. It decided that Proust was clean, but the publisher also pulled How We Decide. Lehrer resigned his staff position at The New Yorker. Wired.com bid him farewell, too.

In February 2013, Lehrer gave a well-covered “apology speech” to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The fact that the foundation paid Lehrer $20,000 for it did not go over well, and neither did the speech. Slate said it was “couched in elaborate and perplexing disavowals.” The Times said, “As apologies go, it was both arrogant and pathetic.” Noting which way the wind was blowing, Lehrer retired from the public eye.

This monster movie, like many of a previous era, could conclude here with The End…? But it’s not quite over. In 2016 Lehrer published a book about love entitled A Book About Love (Simon and Schuster). The ink was barely dry when Jennifer Senior gave it the back of her hand in the New York Times. She criticized its content (“This book is a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be knocked down”). And while she mentions Lehrer’s introductory avowals that he sent his quotes to everyone he interviewed and had the manuscript independently fact-checked, still…

I fear Mr. Lehrer has simply become more artful about his appropriations. At one point, for instance, he writes: “We don’t love our kids despite their demands; we love them because of them. Caregiving makes us care.”

I stopped dead when I read that sentence. Reread it. And read it again. It sounds to me like a clever adaptation of one of the most beautiful lines in The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik: “It’s not so much that we care for children because we love them as that we love them because we care for them.”

I’m pretty certain Mr. Lehrer read Ms. Gopnik’s quote. Why? Because I cite it in my own book—which he cites, twice. (Though not for that.)

To coin a phrase: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.*