Earlier in the show I told you about Ashley, the zany "will you go to prom" girl...and we heard about the fictional young artistes in Art School Confidential...well, I guess teenage angst is kind of a theme this week.

And in this next story, there is hardly any comedy.

You may have read in the news about poor, perfect Kaavya Viswanathan [VISH wan a than].

Last summer, Kaavya published a New York Times Op-Ed piece, "Growing Up With a Dose of Magic," about coming of age in thrall to Harry Potter. She said loved JK Rowling's novels, she wrote, because of their "promise of hope, sustaining the fundamental childhood belief that in the end, good really does triumph over evil, and justice is meted out to those who deserve it."

A nice thought. A few weeks ago, Kaavya published her own first novel at nineteen. It's called How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life, and it's a more or less autobiographical account of a smart, obsessive, hyper-competitive Indian-American girl who reinvents herself to get into Harvard.

Just before publication, a reporter innocently asked if any particular book had inspired her.

"Nothing I read," Kaavya replied, "gave me the inspiration."

But it turns out she plagiarized from at least four teen-girl-romantic-comedy novels by three different young female authors.

She denied "consciously" plagiarizing...she couldn't imagine how it happened.

[TODAY SHOW CLIP W/ KATIE COURIC]

Such chutzpah! No wonder she got into Harvard.

The publisher cancelled and recalled all 55,000 copies of her book.

[HARRY POTTER CLIP]

As in the Harry Potter world, truth triumphed over falsehood—if not good over evil—and justice is being meted out to those who deserve it.

[HARRY POTTER MUSIC BREAK]

This story is compelling for all the same reasons that an unknown girl was paid several hundred thousand dollars for a very slight novel in the first place—her highly promotable youth, good looks, poise, trendy ethnicity and the Harvard brand.

Also, a fiction writer caught stealing from other fiction is rare.

She obviously went a little crazy under deadline pressure, so desperate to keep impressing all the important adults who had so heavily invested in her. And this girl had already been taught that success was not just a matter of talent and hard work and luck, but of cunning—buying connections and cutting deals for behind-the-scenes assistance. A book packager helped her "conceptualize and plot the book."

Just as a $30,000-a-pop college counselor had helped her repackage herself to get into Harvard—a fact that she shamelessly confessed in the press...kind of like a beauty queen bragging about her fake boobs.

How shocked, shocked should we all be by this? We are now a culture of borrowers— musicians sample, painters appropriate, and that's fine with me. The problem is that at the same time we've also forged a society in which misrepresentation is routine, OK, even encouraged. It's normal now for politicians and executives and celebrities to have ghostwriters concoct their heartfelt speeches and memoirs. Sitcoms and pop music sound strange without digital enhancement of various kinds. On the internet, make-believe names and identities are assumed.

And when you take a look at the list of famous plagiarists of the last couple of decades, what you see are not pariahs so much, but people who get new, better jobs and bigger book deals, whose reputations in some cases remain golden.

So, this reversal of fortune that the Harvard girl, Kaavya, has now suffered may not be such a complete catastrophe given her hopes and dreams. Before her book came out, I read a detail that smelled wrong even at the time. Here she was, a big hot novelist at nineteen, but she didn't want to be a writer when she got out of college. No, her sights are set on investment banking.

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