Romenesko Letters
New York mag's
Betsy Burton explains: "With the endless stories about the
Kaavya Viswanathan case, and thinking about the plague of plagiarism, we decided to write
a piece about plagiarism that is plagiarized.
David Edelstein, our film critic, conceived of this idea and tracked down 20 articles on the subject of plagiarism pegged to various scandals. Then he did a big cut-and-paste job and wrote a denunciation of plagiarism that is roughly 99% plagiarized. ...The idea is that we're putting the piece out there and seeing how long it will take anyone to notice." I posted the piece at 10:40 a.m. ET. About 25 minutes later,
Michael David Smith wrote to point out that Edelstein used
Joseph Epstein's words.
