When someone cops your original idea

In high school, I was briefly obsessed with the 2003 film Shattered Glass, which no one else seems to remember. (PSA if you’re looking for something to watch tonight: it does have a 92% Rotten Tomatoes rating!)

Shattered Glass is based on a true story. Stephen Glass (played by Hayden Christensen) was this hotshot investigative reporter in the ‘90s, writing jaw-dropping exposés for The New Republic and moonlighting for other publications including Rolling Stone.

He also made almost everything up.

Sources, quotes, storylines. Whole articles.

By final count, 27 out of the 41 pieces he wrote for The New Republic were at least partially invented.

The film follows the unraveling of Glass’s lies and career as his editor, played by Peter Sarsgaard (one of my big crushes in 2003 and probably why I rented the movie in the first place), begins to pull at the many, many loose threads.

One of the big questions Shattered Glass asks is: How? How does someone pull something like that off for so long?

In a mic-drop moment, a secondary character suggests that Glass could never have gotten away with it had The New Republic run photos with its articles. (They were known for only using illustrations).

The ‘90s were crazy times, right?

But the thing is, stuff like this still happens all the time. People who want to be known for their creative, original work somehow fall into the trap of cutting corners, telling lies, or generally dealing in stolen ideas.

In late May, a story from Air Mail appeared in my Instagram feed, announcing the rise of the Cynar Spritz as “the cocktail of summer.” The carousel featured a few pull-quotes from the article, including one that called it “the ugly duckling of spritzes.” If you were looking for inspiration for your next cocktail order, that’s a solid sell.

The trouble, though, is that it’s 2026, and I’d written an eerily similar article for Food & Wine back in June 2023. The title (my own) was: “The Cynar Spritz is the Ugly Duckling of Summer.”

Now, I’m not so naive as to argue that I’d created the most original thought here. The Cynar Spritz has been around for generations, as I’m sure all the Italian nonnas would tell us.

Nor could the article be called plagiarism. I’m well familiar with the “idea-expression dichotomy,” or the argument that only the expression of an idea, i.e., the work itself, can be considered plagiarized. The Air Mail piece is, in fact, original writing.

But when I wrote my own take back in 2023, the article went viral. I spent the rest of the summer seeing people order Cynar Spritzes all over LA, delighted to have discovered something they’d never tasted before. The bartenders I interviewed for my article told me people kept stopping in to ask for them “because I read you have them.”

Here in 2026, my article still appears as the first result when you Google “cynar spritz.” Which is what the other writer (and likely their editor, too) would have done before considering whether to run with the topic.

I’m not so naive about that, either.

Because of the Air Mail piece, I wound up talking to several other writers who have also seen their viral takes get — let’s just call it, “re-reported.” We also talked about how many writers we know have pitched major publications, only to see the same or same-ish topic covered by an in-house writer a few weeks later.

In an age where attention is currency, it’s easy to see why some folks might think, “This clearly did well. Let’s just do it again because we know it’ll work.”

Re-reporting a cocktail trend is one thing. But it's the same impulse that shows up, scaled way up, in manifest culture.

Elizabeth Holmes, Billy McFarland, Anna Sorokin.

The current line between cosplaying and con-artistry has become eerily thin, which means it’s easier than ever for people to take “fake it ‘til you make it” too far, from hedging a bit on their resumes or dating profiles to bald-faced catfishing and snake oil.

These stories are so oversaturated in the zeitgeist right now — a docuseries here, a New York Mag exposé there — that they start to function as a kind of permission slip. Compared to Anna Sorokin conning her way through Manhattan, a little resume fudging or idea-stealing barely registers.

And that’s bad news for our cultural values and our cultural creativity.

The more we’re willing to invent and reinvent ourselves without putting in the time and effort to actually become that person, warts and all, the more we lose sight of the value of doing our own, messy work.

When we cease to collectively value something, we also cease to value its associated ethics. Until eventually, it becomes less an understood “thou shalt not copy someone’s creative ideas” and more a question of “Why not?”

Great question, and that brings me to another film I rented in high school: Multiplicity (1996. Not good. Rotten Tomatoes agrees.)

Multiplicity is based on the not-true story of Doug Kinney (played by Michael Keaton), who decides to clone himself so he has more time for his responsibilities and his wife. In that order.

Cloning himself works great at first, but like all great and mediocre comedies, something inevitably goes wrong: One of Keaton’s clones decides it's a good idea to clone himself.

A Xeroxed copy of a Xeroxed copy. Remember what those looked like?

The takeaway (I think) from Multiplicity’s attempt at slapstick is that a copy never beats the original.

You can’t Xerox your way into a happier life. And I suspect you can’t Xerox your way into better creative work.

Whatever your work might be, the goal is to do it in a way that no one else can. More than that: to do it in a way that no one else could even think of doing.

And we have to keep on doing it our way, even when, inevitably, it inspires someone else to take the lazy way out.

The Air Mail thing is far from the first time this has happened to me, and I’m working on a new perspective (very WIP!), in which I decide to hope it won’t be the last.

Because, for better or for worse, a copycat moment is a sign that I’m creating work that others want to emulate.

Because if we’re in an era that enables idea-Xeroxing (cough, AI), it’s easier than ever to fall into the trap. To fly too close to someone else’s sun.

This is not about never being inspired by others. Quite the opposite. If you’re living a creative life, other creative people will inspire you constantly in unexpected and disarming ways. You’ll want to pay tribute to them. You’ll want to be more like them.

I’ll even go so far as to say that the temptation to cop a great idea is always there in all of us.

“Damn,” we think. “Why didn’t I think of that?” And, more often than not, our next thought is, “What if I did this same thing, but…”

That’s the moment where we’ve all got to pause, for the sake of our own integrity and our collective creative resilience.

We can choose instead to ask ourselves:

And then we can meticulously credit the ideas we collect along the way, openly express gratitude for the other creatives who have inspired us, and bring our own ideas forth, recognizing that the most we can do is keep experimenting, messing up, and taking deeply personal creative risks.

That, I hope, is the path toward creating work that resonates now and — maybe, just maybe — leaves a mark. A legacy.

Certainly, a girl can dream that her work will wind up more memorable than Multiplicity.

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Find me at kitwarcholstudio.com and kitwarchol.com. What should I cover next? Submit your burning questions (anonymous optional) here.

And if you’ve read this far, here’s something I’ve started reading but have not finished (later today, I hope). After restarting How to Do Nothing last week, I stumbled on it and am delighted by the idea of “soft eyes” versus “hard eyes.”