Why Plagiarists Plagiarize

Kevin Young analyzes two notorious cases of text theft: Harvard undergrad Kaavya Viswanathan, whose How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life got national press before it was published and even more publicity after reporters and writers discovered that it was almost entirely pastiche, and Adam Wheeler, who plagiarized his way into and through Harvard, nearly got a Rhodes Scholarship and Stanford admission with stolen material, and used so much fake material on his resumes that he ended up in jail for fraud.