Glass grew up in a Jewish family in the Chicago suburb of
Highland Park, and attended
Highland Park High School. He graduated from the
University of Pennsylvania as a University Scholar and was an executive editor of the
student newspaper,
The Daily Pennsylvanian. After his graduation, Glass worked for the conservative
Policy Review before being hired by
The New Republic in 1995 as an editorial assistant. Soon after, the 23-year-old Glass advanced to writing features. While employed full-time at
TNR, he also wrote for other magazines, including
George,
Rolling Stone, and ''
Harper's''; he also contributed to
Public Radio International's (PRI)
This American Life.
New Republic work Glass generally enjoyed loyalty from the staff of
The New Republic. In December 1996, the
Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was the target of a hostile article by Glass titled "Hazardous to Your Mental Health". CSPI wrote a letter to the editor and issued a press release pointing out numerous inaccuracies and distortions and hinting at possible plagiarism. The organization
Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) accused Glass of falsehoods in his March 1997 article, "Don't You D.A.R.E." In May 1997, Joe Galli of the
College Republican National Committee accused Glass of fabrications in "Spring Breakdown", his lurid tale of drinking and debauchery at the 1997
Conservative Political Action Conference. A June 1997 article, titled "Peddling Poppy", about a
Hofstra University conference on
George H. W. Bush drew a letter from Hofstra reciting errors in the story. Journalist
Jonathan V. Last criticised the length of time taken to discover Glass' falsifications. Beyond Glass's story, Penenberg found no search results for "Jukt Micronics", and, when he made an inquiry to the
California Franchise Tax Board, the tax board reported back that no such company had ever paid taxes. Lane had, to that point, been unaware of potential issues with the article. Lane later said:
Aftermath The New Republic subsequently determined that at least 27 of the 41 articles Glass wrote for the magazine contained fabricated material. Some of the 27, such as "Don't You D.A.R.E.", contained real reporting interwoven with fabricated quotations and incidents, while others, including "Hack Heaven", were completely made up. Glass also later wrote a letter admitting that he had fabricated the article he wrote for ''Harper's'', and the company retracted the story (the publication's first retraction in 165 years). Glass had contributed a story to an October 1997 episode of the
NPR program
This American Life about an internship at George Washington's former plantation and another to a December 1997 episode about the time he spent as a telephone psychic. The program subsequently removed both segments from the Archives section of its website "because of questions about [their] truthfulness". In 2003, Glass briefly returned to journalism, writing an article about Canadian
marijuana laws for
Rolling Stone. On November 7, 2003, Glass participated in a panel discussion on
journalistic ethics at
George Washington University, alongside the editor who had hired him at
The New Republic,
Andrew Sullivan, who accused Glass of being a "serial liar" who was using "contrition as a career move."
Depiction in other media In 2003, Glass published a fictionalized account of his time at
The New Republic, the "
biographical novel",
The Fabulist. Glass sat for an interview with the weekly news program
60 Minutes timed to coincide with the release of his book.
The New Republic literary editor,
Leon Wieseltier, complained, "The creep is doing it again. Even when it comes to reckoning with his own sins, he is still incapable of nonfiction. The careerism of his repentance is repulsively consistent with the careerism of his crimes". A film about the scandal,
Shattered Glass, was released in October 2003 and depicted a stylized view of Glass's rise and fall at
The New Republic. Written and directed by
Billy Ray, the film stars
Hayden Christensen as Glass,
Peter Sarsgaard as
Charles Lane,
Hank Azaria as
Michael Kelly, and
Steve Zahn as
Adam Penenberg. The film, appearing shortly after
The New York Times suffered a similar
plagiarism scandal with the discovery of
Jayson Blair's fabrications, occasioned critiques of journalism by nationally prominent journalists such as
Frank Rich and
Mark Bowden.
Restitution efforts In 2015, Glass sent ''Harper's Magazine'' a check for $10,000 – what he was paid for the false articles – writing in the attached letter that he wanted "to make right that part of my many transgressions...I recognize that repaying Harper's will not remedy my wrongdoing, make us even, or undo what I did wrong. That said, I did not deserve the money that Harper's paid me and it should be returned". Glass has stated he has repaid $200,000 to
The New Republic,
Rolling Stone, ''Harper's,
and the publisher of Policy Review''. == Legal career ==