The editors of Lingua Franca are offering a new book, The Sham That Shook The Academy, about one of my favorite academic hoaxes of the decade. “In May 1996 New York University physicist Alan Sokal revealed that he had tricked the editors of the

fashionable academic journal Social Text into publishing a sham essay titled “Transgressing the Boundaries:

Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The essay was a parody of postmodernist

thought intended to demonstrate how little contemporary theorists and philosophers like Jacques Derrida

understand the science they invoke and, at times, criticize. The Sokal Hoax, as the event has come to be

called, instigated a scandal both inside and outside the academy that has had an enormous impact on

scholarship and is still debated today. Collected here for the first time are the most significant articles,

essays, letters, e-mail exchanges, and forums that have responded to and tried to make sense of the Sokal

Hoax. The original essay from Social Text is included, as are news stories from the United States and

abroad. Also featured are the views of a host of prominent intellectuals such as Michael Bérubé, Stanley

Fish, George F. Will, and Stanley Aronowitz, further responses from Alan Sokal and the editors of Social

Text, and informative panel discussions.” [You can find the (quite amusing) text of the original essay here.]