Alaska produces about 477,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Yet in Western Alaska, where diesel is the main fuel for heating homes, much of the supply is refined in Asia and spends more than a month at sea before it arrives.

Plagiarism is not new in the writing world. At any level, writing is a challenging intellectual pursuit, whether it is a 6-year-old stringing together his first few sentences or a doctoral candidate slogging through her 200-page dissertation.