How can we get along without plagiarism? Jonathan Lethem makes an argument that culture is a mash of influences and borrowings from other culture. As he demonstrates in an essay in Harper’s. “After 10 pages of carefully constructed argument against ‘those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other,’ Lethem reveals that just about every line in his piece is something he ‘stole, warped, and cobbled together’ from the work of others. He then annotates his borrowings.”