Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired has a new book coming out on July 7th called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. With a fascinating glimpse into Anderson’s copy-and-paste-without-attribution writing technique, Waldo Jaquith writes in The Virginia Quarterly Review [online]:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources.

Jaquith then offers a comparison between text taken from Wikipedia and the final print version of Anderson’s book:

[Jaquith's complete article including extended examples of Anderson plagiarizing]

Anderson took a last-minute 5th grade approach to writing. He found the Wikipedia listing for “Usury” and pasted the text into his manuscript. His reply to Jaquith’s accusation is flaccid at best:

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The knife pictured below was walked through a metal detector at Jackson International Airport (JAN) this afternoon. The blade is just over 3 inches long. Memphis (MEM) and Boston-Logan (BOS) didn’t catch the knife either because my friend didn’t leave the secured area in Memphis and there’s really no reason to check people on the way out of an airport.

I want to make it very clear that my friend did not intend to bring a knife on board with him. Like many of the techies I know, he’s forgetful and didn’t realize he had the knife with him. Intentions aside, sloppy security at Jackson Int’l Airport allowed a weapon onto a plane.

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On February 18th, the New York Post published this cartoon: 

Initial statements from the Murdoch-owned paper declared that the cartoon was meant only to use a recent event involving a Chimpanzee attack in Conecticut to make a statement about the quality of recent legislation. 

But they missed out on the caveat that should come with “a picture is worth 1,000 words“: You don’t get to choose which 1,000 words viewers think of when they see your picture.

Many people immediately saw this:

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