All that other, debatable stuff doesn't even matter: Ayelet Waldman is a hack writer, dull, trite, lacking style, saying nothing illuminating or even mildly interesting to read.

With all the writers out there, how does AW keep getting her work splashed around in Salon? What is going on?

I love men (the ones that aren't pricks...) Most men I've come across are nice people, complex people, not as different from women as I'd once believed.

These sweeping generalizations about women, how we marry mainly for money, shamelessly manipulate, yadda yadda (oooh, I'm sorry--it's most, not ALL, of us!), are beyond ridiculous. All you're doing is broadcasting your irrational hostility and most likely, your bitterness over the fact that you just cannot get laid (shocker!).

Newsflash: there are even attractive women who love sex, and can't get it whenever they want it. Sometimes have it withheld. Are even manipulated and deceived by a partner. Don't even know how to manipulate the court system! Are good people and don't blame men for all their problems! Etc etc.

Going back to the world of fun, rational men now...see ya.

Um, that was the whole point.

(The text and spoken Japanese went off in totally separate directions, BTW.)

It's true; she knew exactly what she was doing and is not some innocent victim. However, she's certainly not the sole person responsible for this mess.

I'd love to see Kaavya have a nice long conversation with a journalist and bring all of them down with her. Who makes these publication decisions in the first place? Even without the plagiarism, the book was supposedly pretty mediocre. Can we have some standards now? Should I be holding my breath?

Maybe they won all the spelling bees because they were up against you as an opponent?

Whether you agree with the author or not, the whole point is that he's writing as an 'insider', talking specifically about pressures--at least in his mind--placed on him by people within his ethnic group. I don't see him justifying what Kaavya has done so much as give us examples of this traditional "pressure" and how it's affected his life. I also don't think Kaavya's downfall will change anything within that community; she'll just be looked on as an anomaly, conveniently overlooked, IMHO.

White males and females have been adding their take on this story too; it's just not from the same angle.

Duh.

As opposed to white people, who are non-competitive and above that sort of thing.

By the way, I suspect she did not get into Harvard on her own merits (hiring a $20,000 applicant packaging--as opposed to book packaging--firm like IvyWise looks pretty fishy in retrospect), but this talk of an Indian mafia is getting silly, if not downright racist. Just call her a plagiarist--her background, regardless of what Sandip Roy said, is really not the issue here.

You don't know too many 13 year olds who smoke pot regularly? Then you are rather deluded. The little buggers are often capable of presenting a very good front to the grownups. This fall two high school girls (sisters) in our town died in a horrific crash after the both of them had been drinking vodka all evening. They were golden girls who had everything going for them, supposedly.

Because you can just tell what they look like from what they write, obviously. Yeah, but in this case I'm dead sure.

Watched it twice. Even accounting for quality issues, there is no synchronization between the words and his mouth movement. I would think it was dubbed.

It's obviously a setup for an ad, 'cuz they link to a site where they sell clothes with logos on them. "Sincerity is the new irony."

I really don't like people who cannot differentiate between "too" and "to." I find reading misspelled crap (that really should have been mastered in around third or fourth grade) hard on the eyes, men or women. I'm sure you're an idiot, and are totally ugly.

That was fun!

Incidentally, I realize that this is hyperbole, but preferring to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge rather than be a size 12--come on. Somehow, NYC chick, I think you'd manage to go on. If not, why didn't you jump off the bridge while you were originally that size 12? You put a weird value on your own self, in any case.

It's not the little girl's using the "-gate" suffix that sounds fishy to me; pop culture has a way of infiltrating the minds of even young children, especially precocious ones who probably don't understand exactly what the concept means.

The red flag for me is the fact that Alexa's dad is a cartoonist, and that everyone nowadays--from the 17-year-old Harvard chick who cribbed from at least two or three different sources for her novel, to, oh, lots of people--seem to be in a rush to grab the fame and fortune, with little consideration for integrity. I could see her parents involved in scamming these comics as the work of their gifted young tyke. It's too bad, and she may actually have produced them, and I'm sad that I have to feel this cynical about it.

What a fucking moron you are.