Boy do I hate this. When I was engrossed in local theater, a reviewer for one of the papers her in Northern Virginia gave a negative review to a show I directed when I had seen her leave at intermission…yet she still “critiqued” the second act. I got her fired, and enjoyed every minute of it. I once read a piece by the founding editor of Slate magazine and long-time “Crossfire” star Michael Kinsey in which he admitted that he had approved book-jacket quotes in his name for books he never read. That was the last time I paid any attention to Michael Kinsey.

New York Magazine has a feature called “Favorite Things” where various people of some stature (that I often have never heard of) write about what they like. A current entry is by Jane Pratt, once a frequent news topic for her Magazine ventures like “Jane.” Pratt’s ‘favorite things” include “The Great Pretender” by Susannah Cahalan, a tome that I haven’t read but might, since it’s about a research ethics scandal, the infamous Rosenhan experiments.

These were the studies supposedly run in the 1970s by Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan: Rosenhan and seven graduate students presented various (fake) symptoms to psychiatrists, supposedly got committed to psychiatric hospitals, and were then stuck in them despite the fact that none of them actually suffered from mental illnesses. The episodes were recounted and published, causing an uproar and sending the reputation of psychiatry even lower than it already deserved to go. Cahalan debunks the episode, for the “experiments” never actually took place; the whole thing was a hoax.

But Jane Pratt wrote in New York Magazine,

One of the best nonfiction books I’ve found within the last couple years is called The Great Pretender, by Susannah Cahalan. It’s that whole era at Stanford where they were doing the Stanford prison experiment and all that crazy sociological stuff. This is about a guy from that era who — it’s just the most crazy thing — sent people who were not mentally ill to mental institutions. He got them to be accepted, then had them try to prove their sanity to get out, and they couldn’t.

As Carnac the Magnificent might say, “You are wrong, Kinsey breath!” For in his substack, critic and author Fredrik deBoer reveals that Jane obviously hadn’t read the book she says she loves. “The whole point of the Great Pretender is that the ‘experiments’ never actually took place,” he writes with disgust. “That’s what the book is! It’s a debunking of the Rosenhan experiments, of the very narrative that Pratt summarizes. That’s not some esoteric reading of the book, it’s the black-letter subject matter of the book. As Cahalan and others have demonstrated, the Rosenhan ‘experiments’ were a grand exercise in research fraud. It’s been convincingly demonstrated that, of the supposed seven graduate student researchers who went to the hospital, six almost certainly never even existed; they were invented by Rosenhan.”

How ironic! A fake review of a book about fake experiments!

DeBoer adds, “Cahalan’s reporting in that book is valuable because it lends great credence to what had already been suspected for years, that Rosenhan was distorting or outright falsifying his research to advance a political critique of psychiatry. And it matters because knee-jerk skepticism towards psychiatry has consequences, bad ones.”

DeBoer professes amazement that anyone would do what Pratt does, claim she has read and “loves” a book she never read. “This isn’t a case of some 19-year-old incompetently summarizing a book they were assigned to read but didn’t in college,” he write. “It’s an adult woman, an editor and writer, voluntarily participating in this feature and plugging a book she clearly cannot have read.” He then asks why she would do that.

I know why. She cheats; she has probably cheated her whole career, her whole life. She cheats so often and with so few adverse consequences that she doesn’t even think about it.

There are a lot of people out there like that; famous people, powerful people, rich people, people who others admire and allow to influence them. When one of them is exposed, as deBoer exposes Jane Pratt, the only prudent thing for an ethical individual to do is to shun the cheater and spread the word to others.