We’d emphasize the similarities, but the gists of both paragraphs make the same point, have the same turns, and yeah, this doesn’t look great for an award-winning big name journalist/columnist like Zakaria. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out that Zakaria in 2009 had lifted quotes from his interviews without attribution–today’s piece runs without any mention to Lepore. So what gives and just how bad is this? Well, going by The New Yorker’s Lehrer Plagiarism Scale, we’d say it ranks worse than Jonah Lehrer borrowing from himself (a misdemeanor according to editor David Remnick said at the time) but not as bad as Lehrer making up quotes (which eventually spelled his resignation from this magazine). And this offense seems a lot more serious than recycling a commencement speech, which Zakaria did this year at Duke and Harvard.