August 8, 2026

FINALLY:

Posted at 9:29 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAPPY 25TH ANNIVERSARY TO INSTAPUNDIT! This blog started on August 8, 2001. I can’t promise I’ll still be blogging in 25 years — but I can’t promise that I won’t, either.

Posted at 8:54 am by Glenn Reynolds

HENRY VIII SEIZED THE MONASTERIES, SO THERE’S PRECEDENT FOR WHAT I’M ABOUT TO SUGGEST . . .

Posted at 8:53 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS LITERALLY THE MOST EDUCATIONAL THING THAT HAS HAPPENED AT CORNELL IN YEARS AND THEY KILLED IT:

Posted at 8:51 am by Glenn Reynolds

CHABLIS IS A HELLUVA DRUG:

Kamala may have even more jump cuts in her campaign videos than her fossilized former boss, and that’s saying something. Back in 2008, Iowahawk had lots of fun riffing on what happened to Obama when “Teleprompter XD-235” cut out. But at least as long as it was working, he could be counted on to reliably read the text on the screen — and really sell the message — unlike his would-be successors.

 

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW:

The truth changes when the needs of the party change, comrade.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Arday’s students think Cambridge failed them. Now they want their grades reviewed.

Cambridge University could be forced to review the grades given to students of Jason Arday after graduates unhappy with their results said they were considering legal action.

A number of Mr Arday’s former students have complained that they received lower grades than expected after “inadequate” supervision by the professor. In one case, a student who asked to change supervisor was accused of being racist.

Separately, Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, is facing demands to refund the tuition fees of students who were taught by Mr Arday after they were “deceived about the nature of their education”.

A mass refund or large-scale retrospective grade changes would be unprecedented in the university’s 800-year history.

Prof Prentice is also facing criticism for failing to grip the crisis engulfing the university, which has damaged its reputation on the international stage. The academics have accused the £507,000-a-year leader of the university of “inaction”, having made no public comments since The Telegraph first reported on the plagiarism row around Mr Arday a fortnight ago. He has now resigned.

It has also emerged that when Cambridge was sent fresh evidence of Mr Arday’s alleged plagiarism last year – having first been alerted to it in 2023 – the “responsible person” allocated to the case was Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of Mr Arday’s faculty who had told him he was “the best in the world” when he was hired.

As a Mister E. Blair wrote of Airstrip One, “It was always the women…who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy:”

How do you edit a book like that and not realize you’re now co-authoring (or as now seems much more likely, authoring) a title by one of the biggest poseurs in the world?

Related: Icarus in the Faculty Lounge.

I reached out to Arday’s editors—Dawn Davis in the United States, and Kris Doyle, who is publishing the book with Simon & Schuster UK—to ask them why the three-month coma and the shaman woman hadn’t made the cut in the published version of the book, and to find out what they thought of other inconsistencies in Arday’s story and the allegations of misconduct in his academic work. Neither of them chose to answer any questions.

I also tried to reach Eve Claxton, who co-wrote the book with Arday and whom he describes in the acknowledgments as “one of the most important people I have ever met in my life,” by phone and text. She did not respond.

Arday’s book agent, Jennifer Gates, the one who described his life story as “near mythic,” did not respond to multiple emails. A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster would say only that the company “is proceeding with publication” next week.

Exit quote:

There’s a moment near the end of Great and Unfortunate Things when Arday’s confidence begins to waver. He’s filling out his application for the professorship at Cambridge, and just then, as he draws to the brink of destiny, doubts begin to fill his mind. “What if I have completely overestimated my capabilities?” he writes. “What if my story ends up being a cautionary tale like Icarus about flying too close to the sun?”

What if.

Heh, indeed, to coin an Insta-phrase.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

HE’LL BE HAPPY THERE. IT’S BETTER FOR EVERYBODY, REALLY.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

UNITED ACADEMIC WORKERS: The UAW’s Turn to Universities—and Politics.

[Claire] Valdez offers a preview of what the UAW is becoming: a union that puts politics first and is leaning heavily on higher education to sustain its dwindling numbers. The results of this transformation are changing not just unions but higher ed itself.

The academy is the UAW’s only real growth market, and the union has organized itself accordingly. Counting about 1.5 million members at its late 1970s peak, the UAW now has only 383,000 active members, roughly 100,000 of whom work in higher education, with graduate workers making up the largest and fastest-growing share. The University of California’s academic local alone represents some 48,000 workers—more than the UAW’s total membership at the global automaker Stellantis. Harvard’s graduate students account for another 4,000.

What happens to an industrial union when its fastest-growing constituency holds an entirely different theory of what a union is for?

The career of Brandon Mancilla suggests an answer. He began as a history Ph.D. at Harvard, joined the organizing drive that produced the Harvard Graduate Students Union, sat on the strike-coordinating team that planned campus disruptions during the 29-day walkout of 2019, and became the local’s first president in 2020. Two years later, at just 29, he won the directorship of UAW Region 9A (covering eastern New York, New England, and Puerto Rico) with 58 percent of the vote, unseating the incumbent and handing the union’s long-dominant Administrative Caucus its first defeat on the International Executive Board in more than 30 years.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

ABE GREENWALD: After Reality.

It’s not just that Gen Zs came too late to catch the USSR. They came too late to catch the real world altogether. What I’m referring to as the real world here is the manifest multidimensional reality in which humans once spent most of their lives, where they experienced the friction that comes from contact with other real people, challenging ideas, and historical events in real time. All that began to wink out sometime around 2007, when the iPhone was released. In the years since, we’ve migrated ever deeper into our screens and their facsimile of reality. And the pandemic hastened the change considerably.

Many of us, of course, are old enough to have experienced life before and after. There are people alive who’ve witnessed World War II, the Shoah, the Soviet nightmare, the birth of the State of Israel, and 9/11. But younger millennials and Gen Zs simply showed up after the fact—after all the facts. By the time they arrived, they mostly had to make do with the real world’s digital epilogue—“learning” about what happened before they were born from social media, influencers, and AI. What they’re getting is not so much history but a malcontent’s primer on the world that’s rumored to exist outside of their phones. And we’re moving inexorably into an age in which they and younger generations will become the majority.

The online world is a uniquely hospitable environment for both socialism and anti-Semitism to flourish in, and Gen Z (online an average of five hours a day) is being bombarded by both. Like the internet itself, socialism and anti-Semitism are primarily virtual. What do I mean by that? Certainly not that they don’t have monstrous real-world consequences. It’s that, at their cores, they both suppose notional worlds that mirror only the surface appearance of the real one. We often have to remind ourselves that “the internet isn’t the real world,” because the superficial similarities can be deceptive. This applies equally to the worlds of socialists and anti-Semites.

North America could soon be facing quite a spell of bad luck:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

ASKED AND ANSWERED: What has cardiology gotten spectacularly right, and spectacularly wrong, over the past 30 years?

The treatment of acute coronary syndrome and MI. Young clinicians may not be able to remember how MI care was transformed with emergency PCI and stents but it is amazing. People with MIs often leave the hospital the next day with only a band-aid on their wrist. The heart and person saved.

This has led to fewer cases of heart failure and arrhythmia. I live in a city of million people and rarely do primary prevention defibrillators for ischemic-related cardiomyopathy—because of all these fixes.

The corollary to acute care has also been disease-modifying therapy for CAD. When I started my career, an MI was often followed by another and another. Now, with optimal medical therapy, recurrent events are much lower. Patients with MI usually live long enough to die of something else.

Heart failure care has also been transformed with the four classes of HF medicines. What was once a miserable death sentence has been transformed into a livable chronic condition. Of course, the challenge in HF care is using it wisely, because most cases of HF are not in ambulatory males with solid blood pressure, but in older patients with many co-morbidities.

Catheter ablation technology has been a spectacular success for every arrhythmia except AF. Ablation renders patients with arrhythmias from focal areas like surgical patients: cured. We still have a huge knowledge deficit in AF pathophysiology. More on that below.

In structural interventions, TAVI is nothing short of spectacular. We can extend the quality and quantity of life for many older adults who faced certain death from aortic stenosis—without open heart surgery.

Much more at the link.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

NO. JUST NO:  FDA Approves First mRNA Flu Vaccine for Older Adults.

This older adult has too many books to finish to trust mRNA vaccines for the foreseeable future. Sorry. Yes, yes, anti-science. Why don’t I trust the experts?  …  Because I don’t have Alzheimer’s yet. That’s why. And it will be a freezing day in hell before I forget the tragedy of errors of the Covidiocy.

Posted at 6:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

A LITTLE STRONGLY WORDED BUT… The Only Thing Stupider Than Your AI Witch Hunt Is You.

Look, most of the comments now made about AI were once made about… typewriters (if you grew up in Portugal, you might be in my generation and remember that), or cameras, or word processors, or– anything really.  Bah. Witch hunts.

Posted at 4:45 am by Sarah Hoyt

THE LAST WEEK OR SO HAS BEEN INSANE. AND TODAY WAS JUST BAD:  Ave Atque Vale.

Posted at 3:33 am by Sarah Hoyt