In New York magazine, author and media guru Kurt Andersen weighs in on the Viswanathan plagiarism controversy in a very engaging and worthwhile piece.

Andersen has some fun with the excuses plagiarists make, noting that Viswanathan claimed to have “a mental superpower that explains her unconscious copying, not kleptomania but a photographic memory.” But his larger point is that the young author is a product of a culture of deceit; he makes much of the fact that her parents hired an admissions consultancy, IvyWise, to massage her application to Harvard, and that many past plagiarists have gone more or less unpunished. “For all her sweet Hogwarts dreams, an observant, canny, IvyWised-up kid is bound to draw certain conclusions about the way the real world works,” Andersen writes. “She might have noticed, for instance, that the ‘announced’ first printing of her novel was 100,000, about twice the number that shipped—and if she asked why, she would’ve learned that 100 percent exaggeration is simply publishing’s rule of thumb.”

(Disclosure: In Other Media cannot take credit (if credit is due) for the “-athon” coinage in the title of this post, having seen it elsewhere first but also having forgotten where. Our own photographic memory is apparently highly selective.)

Related links:
Click here for Kurt Andersen’s piece on Viswanathan