Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Richard Lehrer (born June 25, 1981) is an American author and blogger. Lehrer studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar. Thereafter, he built a media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Between 2007 and 2012 Lehrer published three non-fiction books that became best-sellers, and also wrote regularly for The New Yorker and Wired.com.

Starting in 2012, Lehrer was discovered to have routinely recycled his earlier work and fabricated or misused quotations and facts, and was alleged to have plagiarized from colleagues. Scrutiny began when freelance journalist Michael Moynihan identified multiple fabrications in Lehrer's third book, Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012), including six quotations attributed to musician Bob Dylan. Imagine and Lehrer's earlier book How We Decide (2009) were recalled after a publisher's internal review found significant problems in that material. He was also fired from The New Yorker and Wired. In 2016, Lehrer published A Book About Love, to negative reviews.

Early life, education, employment Jonah Richard Lehrer was born on June 25, 1981, in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. His mother, Ariella (born Jean Hively), a developer of educational software, David Lehrer, a civil rights lawyer. In 2000, he worked as a line chef at the Midtown Manhattan restaurants Le Cirque and Le Bernardin. He appears on one published paper from that laboratory, as fourth of eight authors on a primary report in a three-laboratory collaborative genetics study characterizing homologs of the human DYRK1A gene from model organism C. elegans, a gene believed to "play a significant role in the neuropathology of Down syndrome".

While at Columbia, Lehrer also contributed to the Columbia Review, and was its editor for two years. while he is reported to have planned to study "philosophy, physiology and psychology",

Writing career Print and online periodicals Lehrer has written for The New Yorker (July 2008-March 2012; staff writer June 2012), Grantland, and Seed magazine.

Lehrer was a contributing editor for a variety of publications, including Scientific American Mind (2009-2012) and Radiolab (2007-2012, 38 episodes).

Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker on July 30, 2012, after accusations of fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in Imagine surfaced. On August 31, 2012, Wired.coms editor-in-chief, Evan Hansen, stating Lehrer's "failure to meet ... editorial standards", severed the relationship between that venue and the writer.

Books Lehrer is the author of three best-selling books: Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), How We Decide (2009), and Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012). The latter two books were withdrawn from the market by their publishers after "internal review uncovered significant problems" with the books. These and other work by Lehrer were characterized as having misused quotes and facts, plagiarized press releases and authored work, and to have otherwise recycled earlier published work. McManus goes on to quote Lehrer, with this analysis:

What did Proust learn from [the] prophetic crumbs of sugar, flour, and butter [Lehrer asks]? He actually intuited a lot about the structure of our brain." These intuitions included "smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory, [whereas] all other senses are first processed by the thalamus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness." [McManus concludes:] If indeed Proust intuited this anatomy, it was unfortunate because the taste pathway is wrong, and few regard the thalamus as the source of language ... The review by music critic Helen Brown in The Telegraph stated, "Lehrer is a dazzlingly clever young man whose writing bears witness to both the clarity of his scientific training and the humanity of his literary studies. The Whitmanesque electricity of all the thought and heart he has put into this book fizzes from each sentence." Jonathon Keats at Salon, writing as an artist, approached the "conceit" noted by McManus from the opposing perspective, and described Proust as being written "arbitrarily and often inaccurately".

On June 6, 2013, Simon & Schuster announced that it would publish a book by Lehrer with the working title The Book of Love. In Slate.com, Daniel Engber suggested that Lehrer might have plagiarized portions of his book proposal from the work of his former New Yorker colleague Adam Gopnik. Both had written about the same episode in the life of Darwin, using the same biography (that of Desmond and Moore) as a source. The book was published as A Book About Love in 2016. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Jennifer Senior described it as "a nonfiction McMuffin" and "insolently unoriginal," containing "a lot of dime-store counsel" and "a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be knocked down." She concluded, "Perhaps Mr. Lehrer has changed—personally. But not sufficiently as a writer. I fear it may be time, at long last, for him to find something else to do."

Withdrawn

In How We Decide, Lehrer argued that two main parts of the brain are involved in decision-making, the rational and the emotional. Steven Berlin Johnson, a technology writer with training in semiotics and English literature, reviewed How We Decide for The New York Times long before its withdrawal from market during the Imagine fabrication scandal, where he wrote,

Adam Kepecs, however, writing in the journal Nature called portions of the book into question based on current understanding of neuroscience. For instance, Kepecs noted that "Lehrer's insistence on attributing decisions to either an emotional brain or a rational one" was "problematic" because there "is no evidence that the brain has distinct and opposing emotional and rational regions." Kepecs laments that Lehrer's writing is "neurobabble [which] has unfortunately become commonplace in science journalism."

Before it was pulled from the shelves by publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), Imagine: How Creativity Works was on the Los Angeles Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list for 22 weeks. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called Lehrer adept for Imagines "teasing out ... social and economic implications of scientific theories while commuting easily among the realms of science, business and art ..." noting that "e deconstructs the creative process behind a Bob Dylan song with the same verve he brings to the story of how Procter & Gamble created the Swiffer, its New Age mop. ... " A review by Michael S. Roth in The Washington Post said, "Lehrer practices what he preaches, showing an appetite for learning, a determined effort to cross fields and disciplines, and a delight in exploring new possibilities," while Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic described Imagine as inaccurate, simplistic, and glib, and concluded, "Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it."

Plagiarism and quote fabrication scandal Findings of self-plagiarism On June 19, 2012, Joe Coscarelli of New York magazine and Josh Levin of Slate reported that five posts by Lehrer on The New Yorker blog had reused significant, identical portions of his own work without acknowledging having done so, referring to the practice as "self-plagiarism". Additionally, Edward Champion reported that portions of Imagine: How Creativity Works had been published previously in various forms by Lehrer, and that he had subsequently re-used parts of his books, unattributed, in further submitted publications, e.g., [Lehrer's] Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), p. 185:

The most mysterious thing about the human brain is that the more we know about it, the deeper our own mystery becomes. [Lehrer's] Review of Out of Our Heads, by Alva Noë. San Francisco Chronicle (March 1, 2009):

The most mysterious thing about the human brain is that the more we know about it, the deeper our own mystery becomes. In a response soon after, a spokesperson for Lehrer's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), stated: "[Lehrer] owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work." Lehrer apologized for this unattributed reuse of his own work.

Imagine fabrications, The New Yorker resignation The seriousness of the disclosures then escalated. Some weeks later, Michael C. Moynihan reported in Tablet Magazine that Lehrer had fabricated quotes attributed to singer Bob Dylan in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Moynihan discussed his discovery at length with Mark Colvin, host of Australia's ABC News' program Friday Late. Moynihan noted later that the quotations immediately sounded phony to him when he read the book: They "sounded like a Dylan self-help book", leading him to seek clarification from Lehrer and Dylan's manager. In a subsequent statement, Lehrer admitted, "The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes." He also acknowledged having initially lied about the sources for these quotes to Moynihan when first confronted about them.

In the wake of plagiarism revelations Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker on July 30, 2012, Several scheduled speaking engagements were cancelled. In the days and weeks that followed, reporting on the scope of the issues, and related criticism, continued. Colleen Curry of ABC News in the U.S. compared Lehrer in mid-July to "Publishing's ... Notorious Offenders", Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, and Jayson Blair.

Recall of Imagine

Lehrer's publisher for Imagine and for his two other major works, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, announced that unsold print copies of the book would be recalled and sales of e-books would be suspended. HMH was subsequently reported, in early August, to have placed all of Lehrer's books that they had published under an internal review.

Broadened review and consequences On July 31, 2012, New York Public Radio issued a statement that described Lehrer "a talented and valued colleague." The statement also expressed that the station was "deeply saddened by the news" of the preceding week and further addressed Lehrer's role as a contributing editor between 2007 and 2012. had been accurate. He summarized his findings in this way:

I am convinced that Lehrer has a cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood. This shows not only in his attitude toward quotations but in some of the other details of his writing. And a journalist who repeatedly fails to correct errors when they're pointed out is, in my opinion, exhibiting reckless disregard for the truth. / It is thus my opinion that Lehrer plagiarized others' work, published inaccurate quotations, printed narrative details that were factually incorrect, and failed to address errors when they were pointed out. After the revelations about Lehrer's plagiarism and falsification of data, Chotiner revisited Imagine in 2013:

If I had known of Lehrer's deceptions before writing my piece, I would have tried to argue that the book would have been just as absurd and nonsensical even if every word of it had been true. ... The fact that such a shoddy piece of work could be written by such an ostensibly serious writer is somehow more disturbing than the knowledge that an overconfident journalist invented several quotes.

Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed

The controversy surrounding Lehrer's misuse of Bob Dylan quotes in Imagine and his February 2013 speech to the Knight Foundation feature heavily in Jon Ronson's 2015 book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Slate.com journalist Daniel Engber disagreed, arguing that the media has not been "too hard". In assessing Ronson's book in March 2015, Engber argues that Lehrer's Knight Foundation apology (see above) and Ronson's view of Lehrer's actions and of the apology fail to address the full scope of Lehrer's malpractices; Engber states,

Lehrer's transgressions went much deeper. In Imagine, he didn't just make up quotes from Bob Dylan; he twisted words and reversed their meanings. (Per Moynihan, for example, he suggests that Dylan had "tantrums of genius" and started tearing up his papers when his writing wasn't going well. In context, though, that phrase from Marianne Faithfull, quoted in a Dylan book called Behind the Shades, refers not to the singer's writer's block but to his sexual frustration.) Lehrer also made up quotes from W. H. Auden and Raymond Teller, and misrepresented their beliefs. He plagiarized widely. (Among the victims seems to have been his erstwhile colleague Malcolm Gladwell.) Lehrer's publisher hired fact-checkers to look closely at the book, and subsequently pulled remaining copies from the shelves. His speech included the following content:

Lehrer also announced plans to continue writing, and spoke of potential safeguards to prevent similar lapses in judgment and accuracy from recurring; at one point he stated, "I need rules." Joseph Nocera of The New York Times wrote that "As apologies go, it was both arrogant and pathetic." Michael Moynihan, who broke the Imagine fabrication story, described it as "a string of Gladwellian bullshit". In 2015, Lehrer continued offering apologia for his misconduct at student fora, for which he does not receive honoraria, according to a report in the Fresno State University student publication, The Collegian. At one such forum at Fresno State, Lehrer stated that his large workload led to "very serious mistakes. I was taking on more projects than I could handle."

In November 2014, the Associated Press (AP) announced that Portfolio, an imprint of Random House, had acquired rights to a work, then titled The Digital Mind: How We Think and Behave Differently on Screens. It was to be "co-written by Lehrer and Shlomo Benartzi", the latter a behavioural economist, and professor and co-chair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Lehrer is listed as a contributor, rather than a co-author—Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post notes that Lehrer's name appears on the cover "in far smaller type size than Benartzi's name". Lehrer is described by the publisher as "a science writer living in Los Angeles", and only Benartzi's photograph appears on the jacket.