Jonah Lehrer, New Yorker staffer and author of the popular non-fiction work Imagine (200,000+ copies sold), has resigned following an admission that he had made up, misattributed or improperly cobbled together a series of Bob Dylan quotes that appear in the book.

Lehrer had previously apologized for recycling his own work in various articles.

I have a zero tolerance policy on this kind of thing, also on anyone writing a memoir which contains aspects they have made up on purpose (as opposed to misremembering—God knows I've been doing a lot of the latter lately).

But I still feel sorry for Mr. Lehrer, perhaps because his statement of apology is abject and contains no denial about what he did. Where does one's promising writing career go after self-plagiarism and lying?