al-mofhariz

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O [Jonah], thou wast slain in thine high places.  2 Samuel 1:25 (King James, adapted)*
This summer, the meteoric career of pop-science wunderkind, bestselling author, and recently-appointed New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer reached its Icarian zenith–and abruptly ended. In my next few posts, I'll speculate about what went down, starting today with an outline of events and a glimpse ahead.

Though the details are now well-known, here's a brief summary of what happened when:

First came the charges of self-plagiarism. On 19 June, Jim Romanesco called Lehrer out for recycling his own material for his first few blogposts at the New Yorker. Otheroutletshopped on the story, and—with the help of Google—instances of self-plagiarism piled up, including numerous examples from his new book, Imagine. Still, it looked David Remnick and others were willing to forgive him.

Soon, though, the "self-" was dropped. It seemed like Lehrer…

Yesterday, my colleague, James McClellan, and I held a discussion group on Hurricane Sandy with students at Hoboken's Stevens Institute of Technology, where James and I are professors. Both of us are members of the College of Arts and Letters' new Program on Science and Technology Studies. We called the event "Sandy Studies: Exploring Science and Technology Through Our Experiences and Difficulties."


The students taught me a great deal.


I want to say a few things. First, Stevens President Nariman Farvardin, Provost George Korfiatis, Dean Ken Nilsen, Holly Nelson, and the other faculty, staff, and campus police working on campus right now have done an amazing job of keeping the students sheltered, fed, healthy, and safe. Many students are still on campus, and perhaps just as many are in off-campus housing in Hoboken, most without power.  Providing comfort to this many people during a disaster would be a tough task for any school, but the people here have done astounding…