Plagiarism in the New York Times? Yawn. Explaining away plagiarism in the New York Times with the "mixing up your notes" excuse? Priceless.

An article in The Arts on Monday described the films of the Israeli director Amos Gitai, the subject of a retrospective by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It included two paragraphs, about Mr. Gitai's background and goals, that were virtually identical to a passage in an article by Michael Z. Wise in the August issue of Travel + Leisure magazine.

The Times reporter, who had portions of the electronic version of Mr. Wise's article in his computer, inadvertently mingled them with his own notes from an interview with Mr. Gitai, and then used some of them in the Times article without attribution. The material from the magazine should have been credited to it.

Funny, because that was always the excuse we were going to use in college if a professor happened upon our "lifting" of passages. Well executed, Steven Erlanger.

Corrections [NYT]
Dramatizing the Mideast's Cacophony [NYT]