(b) to excise most of his footnotes." Still, despite calling Sokal a "difficult, uncooperative author", and noting that such writers were "well known to journal editors", based on Sokal's credentials Social Text published the article in the May 1996 Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue. The editors did not seek peer review of the article by physicists or otherwise; they later defended this decision on the basis that Social Text was a journal of open intellectual inquiry and the article was not offered as a contribution to physics. Responses Follow-up between Sokal and the editors In the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies", Sokal revealed that "Transgressing the Boundaries" was a hoax and concluded that Social Text "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject" because of its ideological proclivities and editorial bias. In their defense, Social Text's editors said they believed that Sokal's essay "was the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field" and that "its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document." Besides criticizing his writing style, Social Text's editors accused Sokal of behaving unethically in deceiving them. Sokal said the editors' response demonstrated the problem that he sought to identify. Social Text, as an academic journal, published the article not because it was faithful, true, and accurate to its subject, but because an "academic authority" had written it and because of the appearance of the obscure writing. The editors said they considered it poorly written but published it because they felt Sokal was an academic seeking their intellectual affirmation. Sokal remarked: Social Text'''s response revealed that none of the editors had suspected Sokal's piece was a parody. Instead, they speculated Sokal's admission "represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." Sokal found further humor in the idea that the article's absurdity was hard to spot: Book by Sokal and Bricmont In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science; UK: Intellectual Impostures, 1998). The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology. It closed with a critical summary of postmodernism and criticism of the strong programme of