The Paper of My Enemy Has Been Retracted

The paper of my enemy has been retracted And I am pleased. From every media outlet it has been retracted Like a van-load of p-values that has been seized And sits in star-laden tables in a replication archive, My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in tables In the kind of journal where retraction occurs. Great, square stacks of rejected articles and, between them, aisles One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities, Pausing to remember all that thoughtful publicity Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s article— For behold, here is that study Among these ranks and banks of duds, These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns Of complete stiffs.

The paper of my enemy has been retracted And I rejoice. It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion Beneath the yoke. What avail him now his awards and prizes, The praise expended upon his meticulous technique, His cool new experiments? Knocked into the middle of next week His brainchild now consorts with the bad theories The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs, The Evilicious Edsels of pseudoscience, The bummers that no amount of hype could shift, The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim paper with its understated abstract Bathes in the blare of the brightly promoted Air Rage Paper, His unmistakably individual new voice Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper Of Ovulation and Voting, His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others, His renowned abhorrence of all p-hacking and pretense, Is there with the Collected Works of Marc Hauser— One Hundred Years of Research Misconduct, And (oh, this above all) his sensibility, His sensibility and its hair-like filaments, His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one With Edward Wegman’s Wikipedia cribs, A volume graced by the descriptive rubric ‘The simplex method visits all 2d vertices.’

Soon now a paper of mine could be retracted also, Though not to the monumental extent In which the chastisement of correction has been meted out To the paper of my enemy, Since in the case of my own study it will be due To a miscoded variable, a confusion over data— Nothing to do with merit. But just supposing that such an event should hold Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset By the memory of this sweet moment. Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets! The paper of my enemy has been retracted And I am glad.

(In honor of the brilliant Clive James.)

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