Word: viswanathans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Late on Saturday night, Zhou, Managing Editor Daniel J. Hemel ’07, and I decided to run the story.Some have criticized The Crimson over e-mail lists for “making the news” or “creating the news” with the Viswanathan scoop. These people see the role of newspapers as reporting events that have already happened or are a matter of public record. Newspapers, they argue, are only furthering their own agenda when they drive news coverage by reporting previously unreported facts. I would argue, however, that investigating and uncovering news...
...typical Alloy book is farmed out to a contract writer, but Viswanathan (who declined to comment for this article) came to them. A college-admissions counselor liked her writing at 17 and put her in touch with the William Morris Agency. Her agent suggested she work with Alloy to develop a reader-friendly concept. Coincidentally, she and Alloy hit on a tale about an Indian-American teen who applies to Harvard, is told she has to prove she has a social life, hatches a plan to get one but realizes she has made a mistake by trying to be someone...
...first sign that Viswanathan had, figuratively, assumed an identity came when the Harvard Crimson website reported the plagiarism. (From Opal: "Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty." From McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts: "Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart.") Viswanathan said she had read McCafferty but called herself the victim of a photographic memory. "Somewhere in her mind, she crossed an invisible line with this material and didn...
While packagers are known to heavily revise writers' work, Viswanathan said last week that she was responsible for the borrowings. An Alloy spokeswoman told TIME that although it helped outline and plot Opal, "Kaavya wrote the book." Whoever bears the blame, it's the publishing industry that will bear the burden of having again compromised its credibility with a big-money writer. As with Frey (junkie!) and LeRoy (hustler!), here was an author with a persona (wunderkind!) that was too good not to sell. They all point to the vulnerability of a publishing business (and, let's be honest...
...though, the buck stops with the name on the cover. It's unclear whether Viswanathan will produce the second book of her contract; DreamWorks is likely to drop plans for an Opal movie. As for finishing Harvard, which has not decided on disciplinary action, Walsh says, "I guarantee you she'll graduate first in her class." But not before learning a very public lesson...