Jonah Lehrer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has resigned after admitting to falsifying quotes.
After earlier disputing claims made by a magazine writer, Lehrer admitted on Monday that he had been guilty of making up and misattributing quotes about Bob Dylan in his best-selling book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.
In an article for Tablet magazine, self-described Dylan obsessive Michael Moynihan accused Lehrer of falsifying and altering quotes from Dylan in a chapter of Imagine.
In a statement from his publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on Monday, Lehrer said:
Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about Bob Dylan quotes in my book Imagine. The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes.
But I told Mr Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan's representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said.
Imagine is the third book by Lehrer, who graduated from Columbia with a degree in neuroscience and received his masters at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. The New Yorker announced in early June that the 31-year-old would be their newest staff writer.
The book, which examines the science of creativity, debuted at the top position on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that Barnes and Noble and Amazon are halting the sale of digital and print copies of the book. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt also said digital copies should be off online bookselling sites by the end of the day.
In June, Lehrer faced criticism for recycling his own material in blogposts for the New Yorker. The magazine later amended his five most recent posts to include a disclaimer about the duplicated material.
On social media, the world was mocking:
