August 15, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Jonah’s tweet concludes, “I think the most annoying thing about these people — not the worst thing in a moral/intellectual sense, just the most annoying thing — is how cliched and boring they are to anyone who knows anything about this stuff. These are not edgy, new, exciting positions. This crap was in the streets and sitting in crumbled pamphlets in coffee houses in the 1960s, 1930s, heck in the 1890s. It’s just weak-minded radical cosplay for people who think incanting stale ideas makes you transgressive and cool if your audience already agrees with you or if they’re even more ignorant than you. She’s just an academic version of Hasan Piker and no more impressive.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: “There are no second acts in American lives.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, 1941.

The New Hotness? “American culture is wild, irrepressible, and exuberant and full of hucksters always coming up with new ways to reinvent themselves. There’s a shamelessness to Americans that Europeans perhaps look down upon but that is a great source of creativity and excitement.”

Posted at 12:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jason Arday Should Never Have Been Allowed High Enough to Fall as He Did.

I think, for example, that Arday’s professional colleagues — the men and women who passed him up through the scholarly ranks at warp speed — ought to account for putting him in the position to fail, despite such obvious lack of merit and so many strange red flags. We don’t have to speculate about whether they doubted his credentials, scholarship, or intellectual capacities: In The Guardian, Afua Hirsch reveals that black studies academics in the U.K. had quietly pegged him as a fraud long ago:

The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted. I have had various conversations with sociology professors in which this has been the main topic of conversation, and their questions began to mount into a list. They did not voice them publicly because we all know that whatever the truth or the outcome, he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.

What a damning confession — and published in a national newspaper, no less. Did any of Arday’s “black peers” ever think to quietly go to their department heads for a frank discussion? Maybe if one of Arday’s “peers” had taken him aside, man-to-man, and called BS on his impossible tales (“no way did you run 600 miles in six days, friend”) he wouldn’t have felt emboldened to make up so many spectacular lies about his life — and put them in a memoir, no less. After all, he’d gotten away with the entire grand fable until then! Arday wouldn’t have been able to bring such a truly catastrophic amount of shame crashing down upon his head had he not been coddled, excused, and even encouraged at times.

What did these people’s reflexive tribalism get them? A man whose obvious lies about himself, whose track record of grievous academic misconduct, and whose frank inability to actually do the work on any level found himself promoted, on a fast-moving conveyor belt, to the place where his many lies could no longer be concealed. His peers claim they knew all this — and they stayed quiet even as white administrators promoted him into a position where he was destined to flame out.

Even the New York Times is surprisingly tough on Cambridge’s role in Arday’s self-immolation: Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring.

Prominent academics on the left agree that Cambridge must answer for its decisions. They say that the ordeal has fueled racism and cast unjustified aspersions on accomplished scholars of color.

Cambridge said on Friday that it was “desperately saddened” to hear of Dr. Arday’s death. An administrator, in a letter to the faculty on Tuesday, called the misconduct accusations “an aberration” and “troubling.” A spokesman separately declined to answer a list of questions about his hiring and his time there, citing a planned independent investigation — a difficult inquiry that will likely be made even more uncomfortable following Dr. Arday’s death.

Dr. Arday, for his part, had worked hard to silence any questioning of his credentials. When a journalist for Times Higher Education, a respected academic industry publication, asked about plagiarism last year, a prominent British defamation law firm helped kill the article, the journalist said. Dr. Arday later reported the journalist to the police.

When a scholar from another university questioned his work, Dr. Arday turned the tables and filed a racism complaint with the other school, according to someone with direct knowledge of the complaint. That person, like some others who spoke to The Times, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being dragged publicly into the controversy.

Dr. Arday never squarely addressed the questions of plagiarism and fabrication.

But what is clear from interviews and public records is that elements of the story would have been easy for Cambridge to check.

Greg Lukianoff reminders readers that this isn’t the first time that an academician has succumbed to massive public scrutiny by ending his own life. “Mike Adams was mobbed and cancelled in 2020, and he killed himself shortly thereafter, and the American press largely treated it like he had it coming. Also, some commenters on the Internet seemed almost gleeful about his death. That was wrong then and it would be wrong now.”

Personally, I had hoped that Arday would have taken a few years to hide out, self-reflect, and then reemerge to tell the public about how deeply the rot has set into academia. He would have been a massive hit on the British talk show circuit:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SHE’S THE HEROINE WE WANT, AND THE HEROINE WE NEED:

Posted at 12:05 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PROFILES OF THE FUTURE – AND THE FUTURE IS NOW: Ordinary Abundance. “Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be ‘the limit of human felicity.’ A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

HE LEFT OUT “POWER MAD,” BUT YEAH:

Posted at 10:33 am by Stephen Green

THERE’S REALLY NO OTHER CONCLUSION TO DRAW — AND IT’S BEEN OBVIOUS FOR YEARS:

Posted at 9:40 am by Stephen Green

OH TO BE IN ENGLAND: Netanyahu mocks UK as ‘Islamic Republic of Britain.’

“[Churchill and his son] came here and covered the Six Day War in a way that was very positive for us. Try to find that now in Britain, which you could call the Islamic Republic of Britain,” he joked to the host. “Try finding that.”

“All the Europeans, all of Europe has already become like that, hasn’t it?” the host asked in response.

Netanyahu replied: “Yes, but you know, someone said the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic Republic of Britain. We’re making sure there won’t be another one — you know, in Iran.”

British politicians and their operatives with bylines were in full high dudgeon mode when JD Vance said that in 2024: Trump’s Vance pick riles UK politicians after ‘Islamophobic’ remarks

Posted at 8:44 am by Ed Driscoll

CHARLOTTE LATIN SCHOOL SOUNDS AWFUL: Shot: Dissenting Parents’ Defamation Claim Over School’s Allegations of Racism Can Go Forward. “The Turpins allege that Charlotte Latin and Baldecchi made false statements [to third parties] about the contents of the [Turpins’] PowerPoint presentation [that the Turpins delivered at the meeting]—specifically, that the PowerPoint contained the racist assertion that minority students and faculty at the school ‘have not earned their positions and honors’ and that those minority students and faculty were ‘not up to the merit of the school’ like the white students and faculty.”

Chaser: Fraud Claim Over “No Blowback” Assurance by Private School to Complaining Parents, Followed by Children’s Expulsions, Can Go Forward. “Here, the complaint alleges that Charlotte Latin promised the Turpins there would be no “blowback” or “retaliation” against them or their children if they met with school leadership to discuss their concerns; that this promise was false and, from the beginning, Charlotte Latin intended to deceive the Turpins and lure them to the meeting in order to create a pretext for expelling the children; that the Turpins believed Charlotte Latin’s promise and spoke openly about their concerns because they believed the school would not use those discussions as the pretextual grounds to expel the children; that the school, in that same meeting, expelled the children, as they intended from the outset, despite promising the Turpins they would not do so; and that the school’s deceit caused significant damage to the Turpins.”

Posted at 8:42 am by Glenn Reynolds

IT RARELY ENDS WELL FOR A MASCOT OF THE ANOINTED: “The real [Arday] story is of an elite academic world that was so excited by a compelling narrative that they rushed a clearly mentally unbalanced man with no real qualifications to the heights of academia because he ticked so many useful boxes.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll