Naked hunch

What's up with U.K. papers and plagiarism? Dizzyheads are familiar with the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries's still unexplained wholesale borrowing from Dennis Lim; now The Scotsman's Craig Howie appears to have lifted Rachel Aviv's piece from yesterday's Times.

I'd do a point-by-point comparison...except that he's basically cut-and-pasted the entire piece (save for the first graf and a couple of rewordings).

Here's Howie's "Birthday Suit Parties All the Rage for Ivy-League Students."

And here's Aviv's "Black Tie Optional."

Howie has the chutzpah to use entire quotes from the Aviv piece. E.g.:

Aviv: “It’s one of those things people feel they need to do before they graduate,” says Megan Crandell, a senior who estimates that she has been to a half-dozen naked parties during her time at Yale. “The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how they’re coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated. You can’t talk about how hot that chick was the other night.”

Howie: Megan Crandell, a final-year Yale student who has attended six naked parties, said: "The dynamic is completely different from a clothed party. People are so conscious of how they're coming across that conversations end up being more sophisticated. You can't talk about how hot that chick was the other night."

What gives? (Notice how "senior" becomes "final-year," and "half-dozen" becomes "six.")