(cartoon accompanying essay below in The New Yorker )

WHY SMART PEOPLE ARE STUPID

Posted by Jonah Lehrer

Editors’ Note: The introductory paragraphs of this post          appeared in similar form in an October, 2011, column by Jonah Lehrer for the Wall Street Journal. We regret the duplication of material.

So it reads on New Yorker page, and so began the literary/journalistic teapot tempest swirling around the small circle of interested parties.  Seems the bright young Lehrer was caught plagiarizing himself  and
repurposing various sized chunks of his own prose in an effort to keep pace with his overflowing In Box of assignments and deadlines in print and online.  Moral of the story is Don't Blog if you've already got a gig, cause at some point you're gonna start looking for shortcuts and it's all downhill after that...especially in NYC.

Irony is that I read the article before the New Yorker appended it with the disclaimer and I enjoyed it and even discussed it with another writer here at work.  It's worth checking out:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html

It's stimulating stuff and I like him a lot more than the similarly pseudo scientifically inclined Malcolm Gladwell .  Too bad Lehrer had to resort to self theft --but I assume since they didn't fire him, and he apologized and the only aggrieved party is him, it'll all blow over.

I guess I can relate too, since I often pad this space with liftings from all corners of the digital planet, but I try to make it clear when I do so by either referencing the source or using quotation marks or italicizing as well.  Fact is, the internet is such a fast and efficient way to find whatever you want whenever you want that it's almost irresponsible and egocentric to go it alone when you've got so much available at the click of your mouse.  And the art of cutting and pasting has become as much a part of the creative process as composing and revising.  No question that it's changed the way journalists and essayists work today, and it's even finding its way into fiction.

Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad was a kind of random (seemingly) collection of interrelated short stories (some from previous works) and featured a long chapter written entirely as a Power Point presentation (of which I couldn't make head or tail)--but considering the awards and sales, it's seems to be popular and a trend...despite the fact that they never figured out how to translate that PowerPoint chapter into the audio version.

AND NOW, FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON AND IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER...

Portmanteaus

Affluenza: Sneezing on the food at Dean and DeLuca

Anecdata: Treating random events as projectable samples.

Bankster:  A legally protected criminal.

Bleen:  The color of most of the earth’s oceans

Celebritie: The wedding of two people famous for being famous.

Flavoritism:  Judging the value of food based entirely on taste.

Povertunity: A low paying job offer with potential to lead to something better.

DID YOU KNOW ?  Chortle  comes from chuckle and snort (coined by Lewis Carroll)

There’s probably dozens of versions told …and one was made famous by Stephen Hawking who cited Bertrand Russell as the source…but the essence of each is the same and one example goes something like this…A religious guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies "Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down."

That just about sums up everything coming out of Washington DC on a daily basis.  Whatever the issue or debate --it’s either Democrats “all the way down” or Republicans “all the way down”. 

Nate Silver, The New York Times polling guru whose roots are in Baseball Prospectus, a website publisher devoted to sabremetrics. 

"… politics is intrinsically a somewhat reality-denying enterprise and a business in which candidates and campaign officials compete on the basis of how much they can spin the truth," he explained. "Anything that threatens to connect political operatives with reality is therefore likely to be viewed with some suspicion."

Q. Why are the margins in this post narrower than previous? 

A.  I'll never know, you'll never know, only Google knows and they're not telling.