A high-profile columnist at New York Magazine is being investigated for purported plagiarism.

Ross Barkan, 36, faced a swirl of accusations from fellow journalists following a Thursday piece.

A Washington Post reporter was the first to point out how the structure of the Ben Shapiro piece's lede was nearly identical to a paragraph he had written days before.

New York Magazine quickly appended its piece with an editor's note that credited the Post, as well as another acknowledgment in the paragraph in question. 

However, NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn would then administer what was presented as 'another spot check' into Barkan - a sweep from an AI model to see if he had indeed lifted work from others, Allyn explained.

More claims of copied ledes, stolen sentences, and improper citations followed.

New York Magazine is now 'conducting a review of the writer's prior work' because of the similarities, a spokesperson said.

Barkan, meanwhile, once had a failed bid for the New York State Senate managed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. 

The politician's rise late last year is set to be the subject of his forthcoming book, The Revolutionary: Zohran Mamdani and the Remaking of American Politics, which is due out in October. 

The Daily Mail has approached Barkan for comment. In a statement to Fox News, he said that he 'did not plagiarize anyone' and that '[a]ll of this is ridiculous.'

He hit back at Allyn as well on social media, asserting on X that the journalist had conducted a sloppy AI job that merely missed links to other outlets in his reporting.

'You could actually read the actual column and not rely on an AI-curated excerpt,' he wrote, after Allyn accused him of 'lift[ing] several exact phrases' from a 2025 report from The Intercept about TikTok.

Allyn included side-by-side examples to bolster his accusations, from both the Intercept report and a Compact report from last year.

'There are only so many ways to describe something sometimes, but striking that, writing for Crain's, [Barkan] decided to use the same 22 words as on Penn Station renovations. Barkan's is on the right,' Allyn wrote in one comparison.

An official NPR report from Allyn on the New York Magazine probe into Barkan was published within days, on Sunday.

Minutes before, Barkan wrote on X in reply to a journalist's post confirming the review: 'I get it - media reporters get bored. We all hunt for ideas. We all get obsessed with Twitter. But this is one of the dumber controversies imaginable.'

Barkan's rise as a writer following his failed bid for a Democratic New York state senate seat in 2018 has been meteoric. Mamdani served as his campaign manager.

He has published an array of books since and writes for both Crain's New York and The New York Times. 

He told NPR in an emailed statement: 'I have written hundreds upon hundreds of columns, essays, and pieces of journalism in my career.

'I stand by my record.'