Igor and Grichka Bogdanov have and had vigorously insisted upon the validity of their work, while in contrast, Sokal was an outsider to the field in which he was publishing—a physicist, publishing in a humanities journal—and promptly issued a statement himself that his paper was a deliberate hoax. Replying on sci.physics.research, Sokal referred readers to his follow-up essay, in which he notes "the mere fact of publication of my parody" only proved that the editors of one particular journal—and a "rather marginal" one at that—had applied a lax intellectual standard. (According to The New York Times, Sokal was "almost disappointed" that the Bogdanovs had not attempted a hoax after his own style. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander", he said.) Baez, who made a comparison between the two affairs, later retracted, saying that the brothers "have lost too much face for [withdrawing the work as a hoax] to be a plausible course of action".