Here’s the official Green Party portrait of De Sutter.

Petra De Sutter, a former Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, is an interesting individual. A gynecological researcher with over 400 scientific publications, Petra has been in what is considered a lesbian marriage since 2011 with an attractive blonde woman artist named Claire Vanhoutte.

OK, you’ve probably guessed it by now, Petra De Sutter …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Numerous academics in Britain, especially of color, are currently demented with rage at the press for telling the truth about the late lowbrow liar.

On the other hand, one striking aspect of the Arday fiasco is that the mainstream media actually performed pretty well once the brave Nathan Cofnas got the story out on July 21. The British center-right press (Telegraph, Times, Daily Mail) picked up on the story about as fast as I did. And then Lanre Bakare in the Guardian delivered the coup de grace on August 1 with his long story in which Arday claimed to have been mailed a severed pig’s head and much else of head-scratching interest.

In the U.S., the New York Times’ coverage wasn’t initially strong. But its big August 15 story after Arday’s apparent suicide was extremely informative to Americans who hadn’t been been following my Substack:

Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring

Jason Arday, the school’s youngest Black professor, was found dead on Friday. The school ignored a series of warnings about his life story and his work.

By Mara Hvistendahl, Megan Specia, Leo Sands, Ali Watkins, and Susan Dominus

Published Aug. 15, 2026

When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world, he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.

Cambridge’s requirements, reviewed by The New York Times, called for “an outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” supervising Ph.D. students. Dr. Arday had a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next — not staying long enough to oversee a full three-year-or-more doctorate.

Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university’s youngest Black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify.

That news story ends:

… But the fallout from Cambridge’s enthusiastic promotion of Dr. Arday’s story could last for years. “This has really done some harm,” Dr. Camarata, the speech specialist, said before Dr. Arday’s death.

He said that over the years, he heard from families of children with severe autism hoping for a miracle. “I never want to take away anybody’s hope,” he said, “but this story really has created some unreasonable expectations and false hopes, and I hate that.”

Heidi Mirza, an emeritus professor of education at University College London who once mentored Dr. Arday, said in an interview this past week that he had been ill-served by university administrators’ carelessness in their efforts to demonstrate their commitment to diversity.

“He’s a pawn,” she said, “whose ambition made him vulnerable.”

I couldn’t have asked for all that much better of an approach from the New York Times news desk.

The one NYT opinion article I recall reading was pretty good too:

After a Scholar’s Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship

Aug. 17, 2026

by Michelle Goldberg

… In the wake of Arday’s death, many on the left are blaming the media. “The media lynched Jason Arday,” declared Ibram X. Kendi. The head of a Cambridge college called for an official inquiry into the “media onslaught.”

Important British progressives, including Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, and several Labour M.P.s, signed an open letter demanding some sort of official oversight of journalistic decision making. “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,” it said. The writer Will Self called, in an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for the police to begin “impounding computers,” presumably belonging to people involved in covering the scandal.

Those pressing for new controls on the press are making a serious mistake. Some who once championed Arday seem to be trying to deflect from their own embarrassing credulity, and it is unlikely to work. A deep resentment of both growing societal diversity and bureaucratic diversity initiatives, or D.E.I., fuels the right; it’s why Arday’s story was such catnip to the conservative press. But heavy-handed progressive attempts to stifle questions about those initiatives — to use institutional power to police the boundaries of public discourse about race, gender and religion — have a way of making that resentment even more politically potent.

An interesting question is what do New York Times subscribers (who number over 13 million) think. The best source would be the comments on Goldberg’s op-ed. Below are the top twenty most upvoted comments:

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

I still can’t tell them apart.

Pretty soon, all three will be one big blur.

From the Guardian last February:

Milli Vanilli’s Fab Morvan on his lip-syncing downfall and Grammys comeback: ‘The truth will set you free’

Garth Cartwright

Three decades after having his Grammy rescinded as part of the notorious duo, he is a nominee once more, for the audiobook of his unflinching memoir. ‘I had to tell my story,’ he says

Sun 1 Feb 2026 05.00 EST

It may not be the most auspicious way to start an interview, but I have to ask: Fab, is it you reading your audiobook? Please confirm you aren’t just a pretty face hired to front it?

Fabrice Maxime Sylvain Morvan considers my question, then laughs. I’m teasing: it definitely is Morvan narrating You Know It’s True: The Real Story of Milli Vanilli. But as the recording of his book has been nominated for best audiobook, narration and storytelling recording at the 2026 Grammy awards – and Milli Vanilli are the only winners to have had their Grammy (given in 1990 for best new artist) rescinded, due to the revelation that the duo didn’t sing on their records – I do need confirmation.

“It’s all me,” a smiling Morvan says. “I co-wrote the book with Parisa Rose, a journalist with the Los Angeles Tribune, and throughout I have been as truthful as I can possibly be.”

Truth and lies feature through Morvan’s memoir: as half of Milli Vanilli he enjoyed pop stardom while living a lie, before being skewered by those demanding the truth. Almost everyone aged over 45 will probably have some memory of Milli Vanilli, so popular were they between October 1988 and November 1990: with three US No 1s, and more than 37m singles and albums sold in 1989 alone, they were positioned alongside Michael Jackson, George Michael and Madonna as pop’s most popular performers.

If 1989 was Milli Vanilli’s annus mirabilis then 1990 proved their annus horribilis: after their producer/svengali Frank Farian admitted they were “non-singing performers”. The duo were “cancelled” in today’s terms – Grammy rescinded, recording contract denuded, intense media and public opprobrium. Class action lawsuits under US fraud protection laws were served, while TV comedians ridiculed the photogenic performers.

Of the millions of American record-buyers eligible for rebates, only about 50 ever asked for their money back.

“It was an awful experience,” says Morvan, a youthful 59, speaking from his home in Amsterdam. “People hated us. And when we gave our press conference [in November 1990] after Frank had told the world our secret it felt like we were met by a media lynch mob.”

Footage of the press conference makes for uncomfortable viewing: a baying crowd of predominantly white journalists shout questions and accusations at the duo, treating them like criminals. Morvan remains largely silent during the interrogation, seemingly shellshocked. His Milli partner, Rob Pilatus, tries to defend their position, stating: “We were poor, living in the projects – have you ever lived in the projects?”

No mercy was shown, and Pilatus and Morvan were left to suffer outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows. Pilatus never recovered, dying of an overdose, aged 33, in 1998, his post-stardom life being marked by addiction and a short spell in prison. His death might have signalled the end of one of pop’s most notorious stories, but instead, in recent years there has been a reconsideration of Milli Vanilli: both the exuberant Europop of the recordings, and the duo’s high-energy performances (“We choreographed everything,” says Morvan, “and danced until our shoes were full of blood”). Alongside this new appreciation, plenty have asked the question: did two young Black performers, ruthlessly exploited by white record executives, deserve such public humiliation?

Q. Who was racist:

• The European white record producer who signed them to a contract despite their not being able to sing?

or

• The American white journalists who were amazed and amused by the famous black pop singers who couldn’t sing?

A. They are all white so all were guilty of racism.

Anyway, I never saw what the big deal was that neither Milli nor Vanilli could sing their hits. Didn’t Jean Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady all have their singing supplied by ghost singer Marni Nixon?

Frank Sinatra definitely sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” but the song was composed by Cole Porter, arranged by Nelson Riddle, and the trombone solo was played by Milt Bernhart. As Adam Smith pointed out, there’s a lot to be said for division of labor.

It was only with the Beatles and, especially, Bob Dylan that the auteur theory became big in pop music.

In this century, musical auteurism has been fading as young men have wandered off from music to video games, while young women have become the face of pop music.

American comedians loved the Milli Vanilli scandal less due to Milli and Vanilli being black, and more due to their being …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Goodbye, Mr. Chimps

Steve Sailer

January 11, 2012

Although future behavioral taboos are notoriously hard to predict, it’s clear that within this decade America will end the use of chimpanzees in entertainment. …

The year 2011 marked a watershed in American attitudes toward employing chimpanzees. When I was a kid in the 1960s, chimps were fashionable, associated in the popular mind with the space program and the promise of the new Africa. Plus, young ones are extremely entertaining.

With chimps, though, the older they get, the cuter they ain’t. And they get really old, often outliving their adorable childhoods by 40 or 50 years, with lots of psychological and physical pain for both the ex-actors and the humans who try to care for them. …

The NIH’s move followed 2011’s hit sci-fi movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This ape-liberation saga marked an important development in movie history, more for its medium than its message (although the storytelling was more astringent than expected). Rise showed that you can make a monkey movie without the monkey: Put Andy Serkis in a performance capture suit, then digitally make him up as a chimp in post-production.

At present, that’s still quite expensive. (Rise had a $93-million budget.) But if Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power doubles every year or two, stays in effect for another decade and a half, digital chimps will only cost 1/1024th of what they did in Rise. …

At that price, who needs a real ape?

And that appears to have happened on the schedule I predicted, at least for Hollywood film and TV productions. The Hollywood Reporter noted in early January, 2020:

Hollywood’s Last Actor Chimp in Need of Permanent Home

As CGI replaces live animals, Eli the chimpanzee—whose résumé includes a TBS show and a One Direction video— retired last year but has yet to find a long-term facility. An upcoming documentary will tell his story.

By Gary Baum

January 3, 2020 8:00am

From Ronald Reagan co-star Bonzo to the Today show’s J. Fred Muggs and Bear in B.J. and the Bear, chimpanzees have been appearing in movies and on TV for more than eight decades. That all but came to an end in 2018, the year that Eli, the last chimpanzee professionally trained to act in Hollywood, appeared in his final movie, the Bollywood film Zero. Eli — whose key trick was taking someone’s glasses and putting them on — is now awaiting placement in a forever home. …

The 9-year-old chimpanzee’s transition out of the business, as typically occurs when the species reaches adolescence, is part of a larger trend away from using real wild creatures to “act” onscreen. (While chimps, orangutans and elephants are being phased out, it’s still mostly business as usual for species like big cats and bears.)

A mix of factors accounts for the shift, including the adoption of believable CGI (Planet of the Apes, The Lion King) as well as high-profile credibility issues involving the industry’s on-set animal watchdog, the American Humane Association. Arguably the strongest influence has been a relentless pressure campaign by animal-rights activists. “They made it happen,” observes Barbara Casey, the head of another industry regulator, Movie Animals Protected.

Eli — who appeared in commercials (Microsoft), music videos (One Direction) and the occasional TV show (TBS’ Angie Tribeca) — saw his own output curbed by the effort, with a Geico ad pulled and scenes from a season of MasterChef Junior cut. PETA primate expert Debbie Metzler is proud of the result. “A decade ago, there were at least a dozen chimpanzees working,” she says. “Now there are zero.”

At least, there are zero with Hollywood training. Productions willing to risk the ire of activists can still secure chimps from several private companies around the country that teach them circus-style tricks. These include Chance, who appeared opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street.

I will resist the temptation I usually give in to at this point to retail backstage details from the lurid financing and production of this Martin Scorsese classic.

I was reminded of my 14-year-old column by this sad news article in the New York Times:

Hayden Panettiere Grew Up in Front of the Camera. It Took a Toll.

The “Heroes” and “Nashville” star, who died Sunday at 36, endured personal struggles that were compounded by her public profile.

By Malia Mendez

Aug. 18, 2026

At 11 months old, Hayden Panettiere appeared in a Playskool toy train commercial. By age 4, she was a recurring character on the soap opera “One Life to Live.” In the decades that followed, she starred in movies and television shows. Rarely was she out of a job.

But like many wunderkinds, Panettiere, who died on Sunday at 36, frequently seemed burdened by her success. Her well-documented struggles — with alcohol, drugs, body image, her family, her significant others — seem inextricable from the public scrutiny that lit up so much of her life.

“In an era of relentless paparazzi with an appetite for celebrity breakdowns, naysayers were certain this young starlet would crash and burn,” reads one description of “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” the no-holds-barred memoir that Panettiere released this year. “Not one to disappoint, she did.”

What’s my connection between chimps and the former child star?

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Imagine if every air-traffic controller had to come from one of the secretive families of air-traffic controllers implanted in every city, and instead of passing an exam they simply performed their mysterious rites before a tiny black idol of God in his form as a cosmic air-traffic controller, directing the movements of stars and galaxies from his terminal in the great control tower beyond the physical universe, and then the airports had to hire them. Now imagine the air-traffic controllers all refuse to eat in the presence of pilots, who are their social inferiors, and if the daughter of an air-traffic controller tries to marry a pilot, her parents might try to kill her. Also, one person can ‘be’ a pilot and another an air traffic controller, even though neither of them have been anywhere near an airport and they’re actually both just millet farmers. That’s a jati.

But then at some point in his pieces he often switches from imaginative analogies to sheer making-stuff-up in the manner of Kafka’s or Borges’s high-brow fantasies. In The Metropolitan Review, a Kriss fan with the unlikely (but apparently genuine) name of Thomas Peermohamed Lambert notes:

At the heart of the disagreement is a new technique that Kriss seems to be using more and more frequently in his writing. Rather than sifting through the morass of human culture for a few apposite examples to back up his point — a task that seems pretty unimpressive in the age of LLMs, which can eagerly bring up pearl after pearl from the depths of the internet without ever tiring — Kriss is increasingly resorting to outright fictions.

Kriss uses a somewhat interesting shtick, both impressive and annoying. For example, in his piece “Against Truth,” Kriss writes:

While we’re at it, I may as well clear up any other lingering misunderstandings. If you were unsure, I can confirm that it’s also absolutely true that in the last season of Married at First Sight: Australia one of the contestants entered the Dreaming after slipping into the memories of his murderous ancestor, that I went to an ashram in the fictional Indian state of Parpakainilam after being arrested and jailed for the murder of the Maharashtra state politician Baba Siddique, that I have accurately quoted the Greek philosopher Scroto of Rhodes, that Santa Claus is a Kwakiutl cannibal-god, that I once went mad and started scrawling Aramaic incantations after discovering the Biblical name of Taylor Swift, that I encountered the Palaeolithic inhabitants of the Levant during a march for Gaza, that I found a wormhole between continents in Shanghai and the fox-spirits that control the Chinese housing market in Guangzhou, that the empire of Qin Shi Huang spread over three galaxies, that I had sex with half the Tory front benches after the 2023 Spectator summer party, that AI was preceded by the golem cacophony in early modern Europe, and that a reanimated BF Skinner is secretly operating the Dimes Square scene as his prototype for a society of total control.

Not surprisingly, this week Kriss imagines the late Jason Arday to be … Sam Kriss:

The carrion-eaters

What we did to Jason Arday

Sam Kriss

Aug 17, 2026

It’ll probably never happen to you. Maybe I should pretend it will: try to grab you by the self-interest and say, look, consider that this weapon you’re playing around with might one day be pointed at you—but it won’t. You will never be Ardayed. You will never have to sit helplessly while your entire life is systematically disassembled in front of you. You will never be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. There will never be huge crowds delightedly rummaging around in your entrails, the chirp and titter of a million sparrows pecking at the flesh of a dead elephant: you’re safe from all that. Not because you’re innocent. You’re every bit as guilty as he is. Nobody makes it through life without swaddling themselves in a thick coating of lies. You lie about yourself so often and so automatically that you almost start to believe it.

Obviously, in this case, “you” doesn’t mean you, it means “Sam Kriss,” confabulator extraordinary.

The only difference is that when Jason Arday lied he went big. Huge, rough-hewn, monumental fictions, like ‘I couldn’t read or write until I was 18’ and ‘I ran nine marathons with a broken leg’ and ‘I had a brain tumour removed two weeks before my viva and had to relearn everything I’d written in my dissertation’ and ‘a mysterious South American shaman woman prophesied that I was destined for great deeds.’ You don’t lie like that. All your delusions are tiny, minuscule things. ‘I’m a good person.’ ‘I am satisfactory in bed.’ ‘The people who dislike me are just jealous.’ It takes a greatness of soul to build fabulations the way Jason Arday did. You need a Promethean spirit to decide to create yourself again out of nothing, and real courage to bet your entire being on lies that can so easily be disproven. But you are small and cowardly and you will spend all your life scurrying around in the undergrowth of the world, never poking out your head to look at the sky, and the thing that happened to Professor Jason Arday will never, ever happen to you.

Of course, everything the carrion-eaters said about Arday was true. Since his death, some of the people who think they’re on his side have tried to rewrite history. He was really just an ordinary academic, hounded to death by the right-wing media, because they couldn’t accept that a black man might deserve a professorship at Cambridge. Or, in the more condescending version, he was the hapless victim of all the smug white liberals, who kept promoting him way above his abilities to burnish their diversity quotas. No: this is an insult. He was brilliant at what he did.

Actually, he wasn’t. He wasn’t Axel Foley or Fletch or Saul Goodman, he was just a dimwit who claimed whatever came to mind and then weaseled his way out of his lies by being boring.

He blagged his way through the world with nothing but brio and good looks. One of the great British chancers, a wide boy from a council estate who managed to insinuate himself into one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He conned them all; all it took was some South London street smarts and he had them eating right out of his hand. He could ramble about Australian soap operas and convince everyone they were listening to a genius. They were! But now, in death, you want to shrink him down again. Domesticate him, turn him into another passive victim, distinguished by nothing more than the colour of his skin. …

It’s an insult to blacks to hint that Arday was the best they could do at lying.

It was more that Arday was the kind of pathetic black child that white people want to help.

Arday clearly deserved it more. For all the ways he was exactly the same as everyone else in academia, he was also unfathomably different. Imagine you’ve spent your life digging around in the airless burrows of some shabby third-tier department, when suddenly a person like Jason Arday appears. You’re in an institution that no longer really knows what it is or what it’s for, but here is the living embodiment of radical freedom, a man who invents his own history every day. You’re trying to massage a p-value into significance; he’s heroically overcoming every disease known to man. He must have seemed like a titanic, mythic, glowing figure, a hero out of a distant age. Arday’s enemies see a department willing to put its entire reputation on the line for this guy, and they assume that it must have all been cynical and condescending. That’s because his enemies are shrunken little creatures, incapable of understanding grandeur. Arday’s colleagues were clearly in awe of him. The world is full of illiterates, but only one of them became one of the youngest professors in Cambridge’s history. He did that. He was an Olympic torchbearer: he took up the flame that had been lit at the Temple of Hera in Olympia and carried it from Sutton to Merton. He edited the Today programme. For a while he was, genuinely, one of the most influential people in the country. Some of his achievements were real and some of them weren’t, but all of them were aimed at making this brief existence bigger and stranger and fuller with potential. He lived an extraordinary life, and he was made to suffer for it. He lacked the cold knot of fear and suspicion most of us carry: we know that everything conspicuous and vulnerable gets torn down in the end, and the best way to get along in life is to be as small and petty as everyone else. But he loved largeness. He loved it more than he feared the danger. He gave us a more richly embellished world, and he must have thought we might appreciate the gift. Look at what we did to him instead.

Ehhhhh …

In reality, Professor Arday was closer to Chauncey Gardiner in the 1979 movie Being There than to Kriss’s self-conception.

But there really was once a titanic literary impostor (or was he? Nobody yet seems sure) worthy of Kriss’s idolization who lived large until he got worn down by all the accusations of plagiarism and took his own life.

Who was this?

The bestselling author/plagiarist/villain/hero who was deserving of Kriss’s fantasies about Jason Arday was the author of the …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

At a massive memorial rally today in London for the late Dr. Jason Arday, following his apparent suicide after his exposure as a fraud and plagiarist, Diane Abbott, M.P, the “Mother of the House of Commons” denounced Dr. Nathan Cofnas for his bravery in being the first to go public with the facts of the long-festering Arday scandal. (The politician phrased her condemnation of the honest scholar differently, of course.)

From The Times of London:

Georgia Lambert and Nicola Woolcock, Education Editor

Monday August 17 2026, 8.40pmBST, The Times

… At a vigil on Monday evening the MP Diane Abbott said that a “vicious campaign” had contributed to Arday’s death.

Labour MP Diane Abbott is a prominent figure in British politics who has spent 39 years in the House of Commons.

From Wikipedia:

Diane Julie Abbott (born 27 September 1953) is a British politician who has served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. She was the first black woman elected to the UK Parliament, and in 2024 became its longest-serving female MP, earning the title Mother of the House. A former Shadow Home Secretary and Privy Counsellor, Abbott has been a prominent figure on the Labour left and a vocal campaigner on issues of race and inequality.

Back to The Times today:

Abbott, who returned to the Labour Party last month after a year-long suspension, told a crowd of thousands in Trafalgar Square that she was with Arday a week ago, adding: “He was always a lovely, kind and brilliant man. We have to remember that the campaign against him wasn’t just a matter of a few weeks.

“He was first appointed as a professor in Cambridge three years ago and for those three years, he has had a vicious campaign, a bitter campaign by anonymous people, by other professors who just didn’t believe a black man should be a Cambridge professor.”

Among those leading a campaign against him, Abbott said, was Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher. Cofnas was a research associate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, until the college ended his affiliation in 2024, saying a controversial blog in which he argued for a form of “race realism” that acknowledged differences between ethnic groups, amounted to “a rejection of diversity, equality, and inclusion”.

Abbott continued: “He claimed that Jason was not smart enough to be a Cambridge professor. He claimed that race is linked to intelligence and that without diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, there would be no black academics at top universities. He’s well-known for saying that, but stop and think: How many people at Cambridge and other top universities think exactly the same?”

Good question.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably never be able to get honest answers out of Cambridge dons, what with the firing of Nathan Cofnas for speaking frankly.

Abbott also said that she believed a “vicious media campaign drove him to his death”.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Cofnas didn’t respond appreciatively to Ms. Abbott et al’s rabble-rousing:

Interestingly, Abbott herself got in trouble on charges of racism. Back to Wikipedia:

She was suspended from the Labour Party in 2023 over comments about racism, later apologised, and had the whip restored ahead of the 2024 general election. In July 2025, she was suspended again after reiterating those remarks in a BBC interview, and sat as an independent MP until July 2026, when the whip was restored following the ascension of Andy Burnham as Labour leader.

She wrote to The Guardian in 2023:

Racism is black and white

Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated”, Comment). They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.

It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.

Diane Abbott

House of Commons, London SW1

Personally, I don’t see Abbott’s Whoopi Goldberg-like assertion that only anti-black racism is real racism worthy of suspension. (The previous year, Ms. Goldberg got suspended from The View for two weeks for saying the Holocaust wasn’t about race but was about man’s inhumanity to man as seen in one group of white people’s abuse of another group of white people.)

I’d mostly disagree with Abbott’s view, but I certainly wouldn’t be offended or aghast that she was allowed to write a letter to the editor expressing her belief.

But Jewish leaders were, and accused Abbott of anti-Semitism.

Note that both the Abbott and Goldberg brouhahas were before October 7, 2023.

What Abbott’s two suspensions by the Labour Party suggests is more evidence that the British establishment assumes that the multi-ethnic society they’ve constructed is a powderkeg that can only be kept from going off by junking England’s proud tradition of freedom of speech that inspired America’s First Amendment.

By the way, when a popular person is accused of fraud and then commits suicide, isn’t that usually considered an …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

This struck me as a good choice for folks who tended to live in rough parts of town: German shepherds, a.k.a., police dogs, are big, intimidating to burglars, but also highly trainable and not overly homicidal. People back then who wanted terrifying dogs typically preferred Doberman pinschers or, more recently, Rottweilers. German shepherds were admired as a fine all-around choice for somebody who needed both a family pet and a guard dog.

By the early 21st Century, however, the favorite dog of the lower half or lower quarter or lower tenth of American society was the pit bull (and related breeds, such as bull terriers, American bullies, Staffordshire terriers, etc.)

What happened?

Note that when I was a kid, practically nobody was familiar with pit bullish breeds. For example, on Sunday, November 19, 1972 when I was 13, ABC broadcast the Oscar-winning movie Patton for the first time on TV. A large fraction of my 9th grade class at the then all-boys Notre Dame HS in the San Fernando Valley watched the film that night. The next morning, a major topic of conversation was George C. Scott’s alien-looking bull terrier dog:

Practically nobody in my class had ever seen a dog like that in real life.

So, what brought about the pit bull mania of the last several decades?

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Back in 2014, I started pointing out that the English language needed more use of the fine old word “adventuress.” It’s good to see a sudden spike in 2022, the latest year in the Ngram database.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Even Claude Is in the Dark About Dario Amodei’s Wife—and Her Influence at Anthropic

Cami Clark—who started what she called a ‘revolutionary porn company’ where she sought investment from Jeffrey Epstein—keeps a low profile but is a key adviser to the AI chief. Its coming IPO could top trillions.

By Keach Hagey and Luke Jerod Kummer

Aug. 13, 2026 8:42 pm ET

… She also brought Anthropic a key early investor, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—whom she had dated—as it was getting off the ground in early 2021, some of the people said.

A friend who worked at Google suggested that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt would be a reasonable candidate for the single most central figure in America’s permanent elite. Here’s the 2021 book Schmidt wrote with million-year-old Henry Kissinger:

(I’ll guess that Dr. Huttenlocher did most of the heavy lifting in writing the book.)

Despite her influence, there are scant details about Clark online​—and efforts have been made to remove references to her, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis and a person familiar with the matter.

The pair married in 2022, but Amodei’s Wikipedia page didn’t say he was married until this summer, and still doesn’t say to whom. Searches for “Dario Amodei’s wife” on Google often turn up a photograph of his sister, Daniela Amodei, who helps run the company.

Even Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, responds to queries by saying “Dario Amodei’s marital status doesn’t seem to be clearly confirmed.”

In case you are wondering who Claude is named after: I’d initially assumed that Claude was named after either impressionist painter Claude Monet or impressionist composer Claude Debussy (but probably not southpaw hurler Claude Osteen). But it turns out it’s a fitting tribute to the great American information theorist Claude Shannon, whose 1938 M.S. dissertation picked up a trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk by pointing out how the old field of binary Boolean logic (zeros and ones) could serve as the basis for the not-quite-yet-invented computer industry. And then he topped it a decade later with his “Mathematical Theory of Communication” paper, the American equivalent of Einstein following his special theory of relativity with his general theory.

As Anthropic hurtles toward an IPO that could top $2 trillion as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of a CEO at the forefront of the AI industry—a revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public.

It’s a remarkable rise for a woman who …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Who Is a Jew? California Considers a Small Box With Big Implications.

A bill would allow Jews to identify themselves as an ethnic group on state forms. Supporters argue it’s a step toward acknowledging the complex nature of Jewish identity.

By Yair Rosenberg

Aug. 13, 2026

The state of California recognizes nearly 50 racial and ethnic identities for data collection, from American Indian to Samoan. Now it is considering adding one more: Jewish.

A bill that passed a crucial committee vote on Thursday would require state agencies to include an optional box for Jewish ethnicity on all demographic data forms, from college applications to public assistance programs. Its passage would make California the first state to officially treat Jewishness as something more than a religion in this fashion — a shift more significant than it might seem.

Scholars of Jewish identity say that it has long posed challenges to American law and public discourse, because Jews have never fit into contemporary conceptual categories. In fact, the challenges — and misconceptions — go back centuries.

“When Jews received the rights of citizenship in European nation states, Jews were forced to think of themselves as a religion,” said Leora Batnitzky, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of “How Judaism Became a Religion.” “But this was always contested from an internal Jewish point of view.”

Judaism tends to be a religion of race.

Plenty of proudly identified Jews do not attend synagogue or even believe in God — and Jewish tradition considers them to be Jews just the same. Jewish identity, like ethnic identity, is generally passed through parentage. But while outsiders cannot convert to another race or ethnicity, they can convert to Judaism. In 2021, the Pew Research Center found that only 11 percent of American Jews said that “being Jewish is mainly about religion,” with most preferring some combination of religion, ancestry and culture.

For its proponents in California, the bill, S.B. 1387, is an attempt to counter this confusion by making clear that “Jewish” means more than religion.

Why the Hispanic plurality of Californians would or should care about this question seems baffling.

Practically speaking, the bill aims to help the state quantify its Jewish population and to enable better data collection for hate crimes tracking and public health purposes — for example, by determining where to promote genetic screenings for diseases common in Jewish communities, or ensuring that antisemitic attacks are not misclassified on reporting forms.

The implication that the Jewish community lacks data on where people who need genetic screenings for diseases common in Jewish communities live seems implausible to me.

But beyond these concrete impacts, the bill’s backers intend it to accomplish something less tangible: a first step toward acknowledging and demystifying the multifaceted nature of Jewish identity.

Is that really the responsibility of the state government of California?

The purpose of adding the Jewish ethnicity checkbox, they argue, is to break Jews out of the box.

The bill, which heads next to the State Assembly for a vote, is a proposed — and disputed — solution to a very real problem.

Whose problem?

The complex nature of Jewishness has perplexed the courts, the culture and even the White House. In 2022, Whoopi Goldberg was suspended for two weeks as host of ABC’s “The View” and apologized after she said that the Holocaust was “not about race.” Her statement reflected a popular misconception that Jews have been persecuted in purely religious terms, when in fact, antisemites have long painted Jews as an inferior race.

Or as a superior race.

And it’s not just celebrities who have been flummoxed by Jewish identity. It took until 1987 for American law to determine that Jews might be attacked on nonreligious grounds.

OK, but 1987 was 39 years ago.

In 1982, a Maryland synagogue was vandalized by white supremacists. In response, the congregation sued the perpetrators under federal civil rights law. Its claims were initially dismissed by the lower courts. But in 1987, in Shaare Tefila v. Cobb, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed those decisions and ruled that Jewish people had the right to sue on grounds of racial discrimination.

Recent presidential administrations have also attempted to thread this needle. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination in federally funded programs on the basis of race, color or national origin — but not religion.

In 2010, however, the Obama administration interpreted the law as applying to discrimination against Jews and members of other religious groups such as Muslims and Sikhs “when that discrimination is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than its members’ religious practice.” In other words, what matters for the purposes of protection is not just how the victims see themselves but how a bigot sees them.

“You don’t have to prove that you look fundamentally different or have some fundamentally different physical characteristic in order to establish that you were subjected to racial discrimination,” explained Matthew Segal, a political science professor at Tufts University.

“It is enough — whether you’re Jewish or Arab or anything else — to show that you were treated differently because someone looked at you that way.”

In 2019, the first Trump administration sought to build on this interpretation with an executive order that defined Jews as a nationality purely for the purposes of applying anti-discrimination protections to them. At the time, it caused some consternation among some observers who worried — before the full text of the order was released — that it would define Jews themselves as a nation. (Many Jews, particularly those in Israel, consider themselves part of a Jewish nation; others, including some staunch anti-Zionists, reject this framing.)

The California bill was conceived in response to this turbulent context. The bill’s author, State Senator Henry Stern, a Democrat, was motivated by personal experience. He grew up in an engaged Jewish home, but one that was not particularly religious. His father, the actor Daniel Stern, added the improvised line, “Happy Hanukkah, Marv,” in the otherwise Christmas-themed hit “Home Alone 2.”

Later in life, the younger Mr. Stern adopted more traditional Jewish practices, including wearing a yarmulke and observing the sabbath. As he tells it, he knows firsthand that Jewishness is more than religious observance.

“I got picked on in school as a Jew even though I didn’t wear a kipa, I didn’t have a Star of David. But they figured out I was a Jew and they wrote a swastika on the back of my backpack,” he recalled. “I wasn’t a white guy to them. I was a Jew to them.”

Yeah, OK, sure.

Whatever.

State Senator Stern is …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

From PBS Newshour, more gigantic national news about the deaths of obscure black people in Mississippi that lawyer Ben Crump thinks he might be able to milk for money or publicity or just to boost conspiratorial paranoia about white racism:

What we know about the death of Tasia Fortune in Mississippi

Nation Aug 10, 2026 7:46 PM EDT

By — Sophie Bates, Associated Press

By — Terry Tang, Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The hanging death of Tasia Fortune, whose body was found outside an abandoned house, has shaken her family and community in Mississippi, where two other people have been found hanging from trees in less than a year.

Police have not indicated whether they consider the 29-year-old Black woman’s death suspicious, saying only that they are actively working “to determine the circumstances surrounding the death.” …

“She did not do this to herself,” Spivey told the outlet. “I know my daughter, and she did not do this to herself.”

On Wednesday, Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes wrote a letter to Mississippi U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger asking for assistance in the case. In the letter, Stokes referred to Fortune as a murder victim.

Do authorities have any suspects?

Jackson police have commented very little on Fortune’s death. They have not identified any suspects or person of interest.

Local media report that a man interviewed by investigators said he had argued with Fortune but had no involvement in her death. Police have not disclosed how the man, who was arrested last week on an unrelated charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm, is acquainted with Fortune.

Obviously, this unnamed felon in possession of a firearm who argued with the 29-year-old Black woman is white, and almost certainly a white Racist. He probably drove nonstop from Sandpoint, Idaho to lynch a random Black woman in Mississippi.

Where were the other hangings in Mississippi?

Fortune’s death comes less than a year after the hanging deaths of 21-year-old Trey Reed, a Black student at Delta State University in Cleveland, and Cory Zukatis, an unhoused white man in his 30s, in Vicksburg.

Police in Cleveland concluded Reed’s death …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

I finally watched last Spring’s hit science fiction movie Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling saving humanity from extraterrestrial “astrophages” that are eating the sun. And … yeah, it’s a good movie, just like everybody says. It’s fine hard sci-fi aimed at intelligent 13 years olds, in the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1956 juvenile novel Time For the Stars about an interstellar voyage to the same destination, Sol’s neighbor Tau Ceti.

I’d rank the movie as somewhat more enjoyable than The Odyssey: it’s at least as spectacular-looking, it’s much funnier, and Gosling is allowed to be more entertaining than poor Matt Damon.

Yet, I was starting to get exhausted by the end by the pace as the movie roars past a huge number of complex ideas.

For reasons like that, you might enjoy Andy Weir’s 2021 source novel of the same name more than the movie.

I haven’t read Weir’s recent novel, but I did read his debut book The Martian, which was made by Ridley Scott into a fairly successful movie starring Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on Mars. The Martian’s shtick was that his Robinson Crusoe is constantly confronted with a life-or-death problem, which he ingeniously solves … only to find that his solution poses a new potentially fatal challenge. It’s a rather mechanical way to write a book — although if you are going to only use one gimmick all the way through, that’s a good one — but Weir is an excellent engineer, both literary and literally. He’s great at coming up with technical hurdles and then figuring out how to surmount them. Compared to Weir, Heinlein, an Annapolis engineering grad, was practically Ray Bradbury (of soft sci-fi fame).

(The one major shortfall of The Martian is that the precipitating incident — Matt Damon is stranded because the rest of his crew must suddenly launch back to Earth before a howling Martian wind topples their rocketship — is silly. Mars’ atmosphere is way too thin to blow anything over. I would have employed some kind of marsquake instead.)

Weir’s Project Hail Mary appears to be more sophisticated in construction than The Martian, but he’s still a tech guy first, man of letters second.

So, the question of whether you’d prefer the 496 page book or the 2 hour and 36 minute movie largely comes down to how much do you appreciate Weir’s amazing knack for coming up with sensible-sounding technical rationalizations for his plot twists.

Or do you prefer directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s high-velocity gloss-over of the rudiments of Weir’s plot?

I finished watching the movie with about 10 questions regarding the practicality of the plot twists, all of which AI informed me that Weir had tried to answer in his text. Only one of my questions — Why is the AI computer in Gosling’s starship so much dumber than HAL 9000 in 1968’s 2001? — is mostly because Weir needed his story to be like that so Gosling’s semi-amnesiac character couldn’t just ask the computer to explain how and why he is approaching Tau Ceti, 12 light years from earth.

Also, note that Project Hail Mary was published in 2021 and the astonishingly glib ChatGPT was released in late 2022. LLM AI really did happen vastly faster than even master sci-fi writers anticipated.

I suspect the invention of AI systems that can concoct an answer to almost any question the hero might ask will prove an even more awkward problem for screenwriters than did the invention of cell phones. (William Monahan’s screenplay for 2007’s The Departed was the first thriller plot to seem comfortable with cell phones.)

The rest of my questions about the movie had been answered much more elaborately in the book than the Because I Said So ruling out of informative AI.

On the other hand, Lord & Miller’s movie just rockets right past numerous reasonable questions you might have, using only a line or two of oblique dialog.

For example, zero effort is expended in the movie to explain the Einsteinian time dilation effect that is so central to the timelines in both Project Hail Mary and Heinlein’s Time for the Stars. Whereas Heinlein explained Einstein’s elegant theory of special relativity superbly, Lord & Miller merely have a middle school student mention that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. That’s it. That’s your only clue for figuring out Weir’s elaborate life-and-death timeline.

The worst problem of this sort with the movie is that soon after Gosling wakes up from an induced coma on the starship, he is shown doing a calculation involving traveling 12 light years, the distance from Earth to Tau Ceti (the same star system visited in Heinlein’s 1956 novel Time for the Stars). He stares tragically at his bottom line answer:

113.8 years

(The answer is a tribute to George Lucas’s first sci-fi movie: THX-1138.)

Assuming that was how long he was in artificial hibernation on his voyage to this relatively nearby solar system (and a 113.8 years is a pretty fast trip to go that incredibly far), I said to my wife, “Everybody he knows back on Earth is dead. No wonder he looks so sad.”

But two and a half hours later, we see his best friend back on Earth, the Emergency Dictator of the World (played by German actress Sandra Hüller), looking merely a couple of decades older. In the future, do lady dictators get first access to Super-Botox?

Only after watching the movie did I learn from Google Gemini that 113.8 years is not the time it took Gosling to get to Tau Ceti, but the time it would take Gosling to get back back to Earth with the amount of fuel he has left. And the movie doesn’t explain what the book does: that the induced coma doesn’t prevent aging the way artificial hibernation does in Alien and Interstellar. So, Gosling would die of old age before getting home.

But perhaps you’d prefer the movie’s slapdash attack? After all, do you really care enough about Weir’s clever solutions to problems that don’t actually exist yet (if they ever will) to spend 10 or 20 hours working your way through his book when Lord and Miller will give you the general gist of the story six or eight times faster, via a major movie star and a charming puppet?

The other meta-question is whether Project Hail Mary should have been brought to the screen as a feature film or as a ten hour television mini-series?

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Notice how you aren’t supposed to know about supposedly “purported” racial gaps in average IQ. Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer people these days even know about the gaps’ indisputable existence, much less have thought hard about their implications.

For example, the University of California faculty senate commissioned an expert panel of social science professors to answer whether UC could get by without mandated the SAT and/or ACT admissions test.

The scholars studied UC’s data and responded to the Board of Regents: No, sorry, we absolutely need test scores as well as high school GPA and class rank. Otherwise, we’ll be flying blind and let in a lot of kids whose best hope of higher education is taking remedial classes at community colleges.

UC system president Janet Napolitano, a former cabinet officer in the Obama Administration, replied (in effect): “Ha-ha, I don’t care. Test scores won’t even just be optional, they are now banned! No applicant may submit any test scores. Bwa-ha-ha-ha.”

Not surprisingly, that turned out to be a disaster.

Let me present a graph that sums up America’s white vs. black cognitive ability situation over the last 50 years:

This is fairly stylized and simplified, but not unrealistic:

Ignore the existence of Americans who aren’t white or black.

Assume that the white mean IQ is 100 and that the standard deviation is 15.

Assume that the black average IQ is 85 (one standard deviation lower than the white average).

Don’t worry about possible fat tails or other complexities.

Assume that roughly the following jobs need the following IQs:

100% of both whites and blacks have a high enough IQ to be unemployed.

But let’s say that it takes a 115 IQ to be a pretty good performer as a pretty higher up middle manager in a big company. 15.9% of whites score that high vs. 2.3% of blacks. A white is 7 times more likely than a black to have an IQ of 115 or higher. And there are about 4.2 times as many working age non-Hispanic whites as blacks in America, so this simple model would predict that 29 times as many whites as blacks would have the IQ needed for this rather good job. So, out of 100 white or black corporate managers (ignoring other races), you’d expect about 3 or 4 to be black.

You can see why smart blacks can find a lot of American institutions to be kind of lonely.

What about at C-suite jobs like CEO and CFO where a 130 IQ is helpful?

The race gaps keep getting wider: per capita, whites are about 17 times as likely to have 130 IQs. For the American population, there are about 71 times as many 130+ whites as blacks. So out of 100 white or black C-level executives, you’d expect, just from IQ, that one or two would be black.

I don’t know what jobs need a 145 IQ: Yale law professor? AI superstar making $10 or $100 million in Silicon Valley? But, whatever, whites are 43 times more likely per capita to score that high and there are 180 times as many American whites as American blacks with 145+ IQs. (This is assuming that the Gaussian normal distribution holds true out at extreme IQs. But it’s hard to get a big enough sample size of these unicorns to test that assumption.)

Here’s the same graph, just for 115 to 160.

Now you can look at these graphs from two perspectives, both of which can be expressed as: “Wow, the white-black IQ gap is quite big!”

Recall that this is a performance gap as well as a representation gap.

Ideally, we could partially close both at the same time, but we’ve been trying that for a long time without all that much progress.

In some types of jobs (e.g., air traffic controllers), competence matters vastly more than representation. In other types of jobs (e.g., federal judges’ law clerks), perhaps representation really does matter as well as skill.

To close the white-black representation gap fully via affirmative action would require leapfrogging blacks over a huge number of whites, with sizable consequences for competence.

What about a compromise?

If blacks were to get, say, half of the racial gap in average test performance, i.e., 7.5 IQ points, as an affirmative action bonus. For instance, a black scoring 107.5 would get a net score of 115. The following graph shows the impact:

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Thus, from the New York Times op-ed page:

A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows That Universities Don’t Get It

Aug. 8, 2026

By Jesse Singal

Mr. Singal is a host of the podcast “Blocked and Reported.”

… The [Jason Arday] scandal broke out only when the philosopher of biology Nathan Cofnas published a lengthy Substack post last month dragging all of the plagiarism accusations into full public view. …

Mr. Cofnas was not an ideal messenger, given his interest in the purported correlation between race and intellect. In a meritocracy, he wrote, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Jesse Singal is a pretty brave opinion journalist who took on Big Trans for years back when that was enormously unfashionable in New York media circles.

So why does he refer to the correlation between race and intellect as “purported” when it is one of the most overwhelmingly replicated findings in all of settled science?

For example, here are summary tables from Philip L. Roth et al’s 2001 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology, ETHNIC GROUP DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY IN EMPLOYMENT AND EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS: A META-ANALYSIS

Roth and company assembled 6,246,729 test scores from 105 test-years. Overall, they found a black-white gap in average test scores of 1.10 standard deviations (16.5 IQ points).

The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) showed a particularly large racial gap of 1.34 standard deviations overall (20 IQ points). I’m guessing that self-selection played a role: blacks tend to work more in government jobs where, say, a Master’s in Education gets you a bump in salary.

This is not pseudoscience or even cutting edge work

Now, obviously, this data doesn’t prove that the IQ Gap is due to Nature or Nurture. Typically, your parents provide both. So, distinguishing between the two is the Big Leagues of intellectual acuity.

I suspect what’s going on is that a huge number of people hear the word “race” and get a different picture in their head of what that means than what I am thinking. Here’s a reasonable tweet, but one that I very much disagree with:

In other words, the word “race” turns off the “Correlation Does Not Prove Causation” alarm that most people with a 3 digit IQ has in their heads in the 21st Century.

Instead, the word “race” is assumed to require genetic causality. In fact, the conventional wisdom often insists that race cannot exist without all sorts of absurd requirements about every single black person having genes that every single white person doesn’t have.

So, if somebody is not willing to concede that genetics influences racial differences in IQ bell curves, then they think that any “correlation” between race and intellect is unproven or complete spurious.

But of course, in the real world, racial differences in average IQ obviously matter, no matter what their cause, whether Nature, Nurture, or Noise.

Yet, few people realize that.

In contrast, when I use the word “race” in reference to test scores, what it means to me is:

Which Race Box (or Boxes) did the test-taker check on his paperwork?

America produces countless studies each year on racial differences (most of them designed and carried out by progressives). I’m a big fan of the social sciences, so I’ve thought carefully about how they are implemented.

Virtually all of them assign people to various race categories via the simple expedient of asking them to check one or more Race Boxes. Note that the vast majority of studies, whether done by the many blank slatists or by the few race realists, use the exact same method: …

Subscribe now

Paywall here:

Read more

In the crazed weeks following George Floyd’s demise on May 25, 2020, much of the American news and publishing industries chose to switch their copyediting rules from even-handedly lowercasing “both blacks and whites” to pointedly uppercasing one race but not the other: “both Blacks and whites.”

Despite recent talk of a vibe shift, virtually no media institution has apologized for its 2020 act of racist animus and shifted back to equal capitalization.

In that memorable (and thus frequently memoryholed) Summer of 2020, black Princeton history professor Nell Irvin Painter explained why, instead, she would capitalize “Whites:” as an act of hostility toward the oppressor race:

Rethinking Capitalization

The ups and downs of racial identity

by Nell Irvin Painter

So momentous, so dark yet hopeful, these times have turned our world upside down.

Police brutality brought into the light. Masses in the streets confronting American history, toppling the Confederacy after years—decades—of well-mannered but vain protest. We are left to grapple with the conventions of American public life.

Restructuring policing in ways that matter will take months, years—and many more Confederate monuments remain standing than have come down. But one change has been implemented quickly: translating this social upheaval into print has suddenly and all but unanimously restored a capital “B” to “Black.” I say “restored,” because that capital “B” appeared in the 1970s. I used it myself. Then copyeditors, uncomfortable with both the odd combination of uppercase “Black” and lowercase “white” and the unfamiliar, bumpy “Black and White,” took off both capital letters. In one of many turns in the history of racial capitalization, “Black” returned to “black.” There’s a history to issues of capitalization.

No doubt some books would capitalize “Blacks” in the 1970s, but most did not:

The major news outlets did not capitalize “blacks” in the 20th Century. For example, here’s a screenshot of a New York Times editorial from 50 years ago in 1976 in which the phrase “both blacks and whites” is lowercased same as the New York Times would have done on the day before George Floyd died (the content of the editorial is more frank, though):

“Spell It with a Capital,” exhorted the Chicago Conservator in 1878. This pioneering Black weekly newspaper was founded by Ferdinand Lee Barnett, the husband of the crusading anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells. For the Conservator, as for journalists in the succeeding half century, the letter in question was “N,” for “Negro,” the then progressive name for Americans of African descent.

As part of an extensive letter-writing campaign, W.E.B. Du Bois asked the New York Times in 1926 to capitalize “Negro” because the lower-case “N” inflicted “a personal insult.” The Times refused, although the New Republic had agreed years earlier. By 1930, all Black and several important White newspapers, including the New York World, New York Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and New York Times, had adopted the capital “N.” Capital-N “Negro” was standard usage by the 1950s.

In the 1960s, “Black,” formerly considered derogatory, gained acceptance as a sign of race pride, thanks to Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and Black Power coming out of the Civil Rights movement. In the 1970s, capital “B Black” emerged in Black writing, sometimes but not always along with a corresponding capital “W White.” …

In the wake of massive George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, Black people and their allies now regard capitalizing “Black” as a badge of honor. By mid-June 2020, prominent newspapers and journalists’ associations were embracing the capital “B.” Even Fox News has joined the crowd. The most common motive for change was summed up as respect. As I started thinking about racial capitalization, I asked my multiracial, multiethnic Facebook friends for their views. They variously mentioned cultural identity, pride, and a shared “ethnicity,” meaning Black American ethnicity, skipping over the various cultural backgrounds of Black people from around the Western Hemisphere and beyond. The case for capitalizing “Black” seemed obvious, whether as an ethnicity (a minority view) or a racial designation.

I thought The Science of genetics had proven that blacks were the most diverse?

The assertion that you hear sometimes rationalizing “both Blacks and whites” that “Blacks” are capitalized to represent one distinct American ethnicity flounders on the fact that the capitalized word is also used for blacks around the world. For example, during this year’s World Cup, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by a black woman entitled:

Why Brazil vs Haiti is the perfect World Cup match to mark Juneteenth

Brazil is home to the largest population of people of African descent outside of Africa, while Haiti became the first sovereign Black nation in the world, …

My decision not to explain myself in that initial piece was to honor those who did not require explanation; who, like me, are constantly searching for the gatherings within the glittering soirée of the World Cup that create space to celebrate Blackness in all its expansive cultural and geographic representation. …

It does not matter how many players on Brazil’s World Cup squad are or identify as Black; a passing glance at the titans of Brazilian football reveals its roots: Pelé, Ronaldo, Formiga, Ronaldinho, Sissi, Cafu. Gabriel, Neymar, Endrick, Kerolin, and Vinicius Junior.

Back to Professor Painter in 2020:

So what about “wWhite”? Perhaps the lowercase “w” for “White” mainly signals an unwillingness to poke the fiery hornet’s nest of the White nationalism of people like the Charleston church assassin, who capitalized “White.” Besides, says the New York Times, White “doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does.” …

Eh, come on … that’s just dopey. The reason we don’t have a white history month is because, since the 1400s, every month is white history month.

When I compare the cultural, intellectual, and historical heft of the three categories, Black comes out well ahead of the other two.

For sheer intellectual heft? Really?

We have whole libraries of books and articles about Blackness, world-beating traditions of Black music and literature, even entire academic departments thirty to fifty years old specializing in African American/Black studies. Compared to Blackness, Whiteness and brownness are severely under-theorized. …

Now, Professor Painter explains why white people should be forced to bear the Scarlet Capital Letter of Whiteness:

“White” should be capitalized in order to unmask Whiteness as an American racial identity as historically important as Blackness. No longer should White people be allowed the comfort of racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced. These Facebook friends said being racialized makes White people squirm, so, yes, racialize them with a capital “W.” Make them squirm. …

Like I’ve been saying, publishing “both Blacks and whites” is an act of racist animus.

The popularity of this tweet:

got me thinking about other examples of people using uppercase or lowercase to signal whom they respect or despise.

One example is the growth of the term “the Deaf Community,” which is now seen in Americans books more than “the deaf community.”

On the other hand, “the Blind community” has never appeared in any American book known to Google.

(The reason deaf people act more like an ethnicity than do blind people is because those who use sign language have their own language. American Sign Language is not an offshoot of English, but of French sign language. In contrast, schools for the blind just use English, same as other schools. So, schools for the deaf have had more episodes of radical activism than schools for the blind.)

What about new horizons in typographical ass-kissing?

In the future, perhaps flouncy drag queen M to Fs will be not just be capitalized but also italicized, while dominance-demanding autogynephilic M to Fs will require boldface: “both Trans Women and Trans Women.”

You can also get clues about writers by how they capitalize:

• “Both Laplanders and Swedes are indigenous” — normal

• “The Sami are Indigenous, but Swedes are settler colonialists” — Ph.D. candidate

Or:

• “This redheaded lawyer from Bondi Beach named O’Hallihan whose great-great-great-great-grandmother was a hunter-gather has become the first Aboriginal law school professor” — every newspaper in Australia

• “This redheaded lawyer from County Kerry named O’Hallihan whose every single great-great-great-great-grandparent was born in Ireland is not aboriginal. Why do you even ask? What kind of nativist question is that?” — every newspaper in Ireland

Likewise:

• "both Jews and Nazis" -- normal

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Now, in the wake of the Arday Fiasco, I’m going to return to a detailed look at a New York Times article from three weeks that baffled me then but now I finally think I understand.

First, some backstory:

The 19th Century Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, were rich girls from South Carolina who turned against slavery and became leading Northern abolitionists and feminists. With Angelina’s husband Timothy Dwight Weld (distant kinsman of actress Tuesday Weld and Massachusetts Governor William Weld), they wrote the 1839 book American Slavery As It Is, which was based on clippings from Southern newspapers, such as runaway slave ads, that inadvertently documented the cruelties of slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe used American Slavery As It Is extensively when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Meanwhile, their brother down South had three children with his mulatta mistress. Before his death in 1852, the brother taught his secret family how to read. The Grimke Sisters never learned of their nephews’ existence until they read in 1868 about a freedmen’s school where the two best pupils were the Grimke Brothers.

The Grimke Sisters made sure that Archibald and Francis Grimke got the best education possible: e.g., Archibald became the second black graduate of Harvard Law School and later was the U.S. consul in the Dominican Republic, while Francis was a prominent minister. Archibald’s daughter later became a well-known Harlem Renaissance writer.

The Grimke family has been well-known to scholars for a long time, and been the subjects of multiple books and dissertations.

Still, Kerri K. Greenidge’s 2022 biography of the extended family, The Grimkes, was rapturously received through its mechanism of being snarky toward the white Grimkes and emphasizing the psychological suffering of the Talented Tenth Grimkes. After all, racism is cool lately as long as you are racist toward whites and not racist toward blacks.

For example, in The Atlantic, former Harvard President Doctor Faust (Drew Gilpin Faust), whom Larry Summers handed $50 million to when he got in trouble with the feminist thought police in 2005, raved:

In recent years, considerable attention has been directed by scholars of history and literature to the question of slavery’s ‘afterlife,’ to the assessment of its impact long after its legal demise. Greenidge embraces this perspective as she connects the injustices of the present with their roots. She finds their origins embedded not just in the strictures of society and law, but in the human psychology formed in the families that racism has so profoundly shaped. Our nation’s racial trauma lives on.

From a book review in the New York Times in 2022:

Slavery’s Indelible Stain on a White Abolitionist Legend

“The Grimkes,” by the historian Kerri Greenidge, provides a nuanced, revisionist account of an American family best known for a pair of white abolitionist sisters.

By Michael P. Jeffries

Michael P. Jeffries is the dean of academic affairs and a professor of American studies at Wellesley College. He is the author of three books on race and American culture.

Oct. 29, 2022

THE GRIMKES: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, by Kerri K. Greenidge

Born at the turn of the 19th century, the Grimke sisters, Angelina and Sarah, left their slaveholding family in Charleston, S.C., as young adults and made new lives for themselves as abolitionists in the North. In 1838, Angelina became the first woman to speak before a legislative body in the United States when she addressed the Massachusetts Legislature and called for an immediate end to slavery. In the same speech, she made a passionate case for women’s rights, insisting that women belonged at the center of major political debates. “Are we aliens because we are women?” she asked. “Are we bereft of citizenship because we are the mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people?”

The Grimke sisters became celebrities, publishing essays that shaped abolitionist thinking and reluctantly stepping into a male-dominated public sphere where they were never completely welcome. Their fame derived from both their words and their deeds. They rejected their white inheritance by coming north and joining the movement, gaining moral credibility that few of their peers could match. But in her new book, “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family,” the historian Kerri Greenidge challenges this narrative, showing that the sisters’ contributions to abolition and women’s rights were undergirded by the privileges they reaped from slavery. The lives they built, and their relationships with Black relatives, were poisoned by the profits, violence and shame of white supremacy.

The Grimke sisters were admired during their lifetimes for being among the rare rich Southerners to have walked away from all that money to become ardent abolitionists.

“The Grimkes” is a family biography. … She explores the contradictions of American ideas about freedom, highlighting that among white people, racial progress almost never implies Black self-determination or true equality.

I.e., reparations.

And she paints an unsparing portrait of the Black elite as an anxious and aloof vanguard whose well-intended brand of racial activism never truly addressed the problems of the Black masses.

Whereas we know all about how to solve the problems of the black masses these days.

We do, don’t we?

While all these facets are compelling, the book’s most affecting contribution is Greenidge’s treatment of intergenerational racial trauma. What exactly does “the legacy of slavery” mean? Two indisputable features of this legacy are enforced poverty and subjection to state violence, which have clear effects on Black people’s wealth, health and happiness. But there is also a more amorphous sense of the psychological trauma of slavery and racism that is not so easily described. Society has changed and more recent generations of Black Americans have not faced the brutality and dehumanization of bondage. So how does the trauma of that era ripple across time and space?

I dunno. Maybe it doesn’t?

As I’ve often pointed out, American elites became obsessively antiquarian during the Great Awokening, without explaining terribly plausibly how Bad Events in the Increasingly Distant Past would cause 21st Century blacks to, say, shoot up block parties at such a vast rate.

Greenidge provides a consummate cartography of racial trauma, demonstrating, through an adept use of the family’s letters, diaries and other archival materials,

Note that line “demonstrating, through an adept use of the family’s letters, diaries and other archival materials.”

how the physical and emotional abuses of slavery traveled through generations long after abolition.

While it may often seem that way to women novelists, proving that “the physical and emotional abuses of slavery traveled through generations long after abolition” does to more objective social scientists has proven frustrating.

Within the Grimke family, the agony did not spread evenly across divisions of race, gender, sexuality and generation, but it mutated and endured. So many Grimkes stubbornly tried to minimize the violence of the past in the pursuit of achievement and respect. Time and again, the pressure to attain social standing coincided with intense shame of Blackness, womanhood and Black womanhood.

Notice that since the summer of 2020, the New York Times has capitalized “Black” and lowercased “white.” Isn’t it about time that it also capitalizes “Woman” and lowercases “man”?

Are you saying that Women don’t deserve to be uppercased?

OK, so the Grimkes appeared to do pretty well, all in all. But if you read their letters in the archives, as transcribed by the infinitely trustworthy Dr. Greenidge, you can see that the black ones were suffering psychically from the trauma of slavery rippling across time and space, while the white Grimkes were poisoned by the effects of white supremacy.

Or so Dr. Greenidge asserts.

After all, you haven’t read the Grimke’s private letters and she has.

She has, hasn’t she?

Sarah Grimke was born in 1792, her sister Angelina in 1805. The Grimkes’ home and the city of Charleston were colored by a fear of Black savagery that was a projection of white men’s proclivity for raping Black women and destroying Black families.

I mean, it’s all purely a projection, right?

Sarah apprehended the sickness of slavery at an early age, though she initially understood slavery as a sin that she had to atone for rather than a problem that could be solved only by empowering Black people. …

I.e., reparations. When they talk about wanting equity, they mean they want your home equity.

But alliances between Black and white women at the center of abolitionist activism were short-lived. As Greenidge writes, “White reformers’ dedication to Black people as a moral obligation to be fulfilled did not always translate into a belief that Black people were intellectually and politically capable.” …

After all, only Nathan Cofnas would suggest that the reason no blacks have yet won Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, or Medicine is anything other than White Racism.

Sarah and Angelina decided to sponsor their Black nephews’ education and integration into polite society. They laid a path for Archie and Frank to join the Black elite, W.E.B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” charged with uplifting the masses and embodying respectability. This financial and social sponsorship, like the Grimke sisters’ political activities, was made possible by their family’s wealth. Despite their public calls for abolition, they never demanded that Henry release the people he enslaved or compensate them for their labor.

Actually, the Grimke Sisters were the most extremist advocates of “immediatism” — instant abolition.

While Greenidge cannot confirm that Henry raped Nancy, she argues that at the very least Nancy was coerced and unable to resist assault.

Back in the 1940s, anti-Communist novelist Zorah Neale Hurston wrote in her memoir Dust Tracks on the Road:

I am a mixed-blood, it is true, but I differ from the party line in that I neither consider it an honor nor a shame. I neither claim Jefferson as my grandpa, nor exclaim, “Just look how that white man took advantage of my grandma!” It does not matter in the first place, and then in the next place, I do not know how it came about. Since nobody ever told me, I give my ancestress the benefit of the doubt. She probably ran away from him just as fast as she could. But if that white man could run faster than my grandma, that was no fault of hers. Anyway, you must remember, he didn’t have a thing to do but to keep on running forward. She, being the pursued, had to look back over her shoulder every now and then to see how she was doing. And you know your ownself, how looking backwards slows people up.

Back to the NYT book review: …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

Within a few years, one obvious tell should have become that you shouldn’t get too excited over the cases taken on by attorney Ben Crump, such as Trayvon, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Jacob Blake. Each one would initially sound like Crump finally had Proof of the giant white conspiracy to murder innocent blacks. But then when the details finally came out, it was just more lowlife screw-ups.

Now, Crump is promoting three blood libel conspiracy theories that whites murdered three black youths, each of whom more likely died accidentally, two by drowning, one by self-inflicted gunshot.

Q. What’s Crump’s proof of his clients’ sons being murdered by Racist Whites?

A. They were socializing with their white friends.

And we all know that whites are constantly plotting to murder their black friends.

Why do young black males die by gunshot and drowning so much? I mean, it can’t possibly be the fault of black people, so therefore it must be the fault of white people.

The Guardian, which did such fine work when it finally weighed in on Jake Arday, has fallen hard for one of Crump’s stories. From the Guardian news section:

Nolan Wells went to an island with friends and never came home. His death has renewed debate over race and justice in Mississippi

Uncertainty around the investigation into the death of the 18-year-old, whose body was found after a 4 July boat trip with friends, has led some to question whether justice will be meted out equally

Adria R Walker

Wed 5 Aug 2026 06.00 EDT

Almost a month after his body was found, mystery still shrouds what happened to Nolan Xavier Wells, an 18-year-old college student from Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

There are the facts: Wells was alive on the morning of 4 July when he and a group of friends took a boat out to Horn Island, a barrier island off the coast of Mississippi. Hundreds of people were on the island, enjoying a last hurrah before returning to work or school after the holiday weekend. Wells was due to report to Southwest Mississippi Community College the following Monday for football camp, but he never returned home with his friends that day. The last known photos of him were taken around 4pm that afternoon.

Three weeks ago in “Is Nolan Wells the New Emmett Till?” I pointed out that the CDC reports that black males age 15-24 die by drowning 2.9 times as often as white males of the same age:

It would be a good deed for the press to Raise Awareness among young black men of the dangers of drowning. But the media would rather talk about the Murderous White Friends menace:

… In a widely circulated photo of Wells and his friends from the boat, scores of people on social media have pointed out the racial makeup of the group: Wells was the only Black person, while the three others with him were white, one of whom is the stepson of the Jackson county chancery judge Ashlee Cole. None of the others who were on the boat have been named as suspects in connection to Wells’s death, though Jackson county sheriff John Ledbetter has said that Wells’s friends were cooperating with authorities.

The case, and the uncertainty surrounding the investigation into Wells’s death, have sparked discussions about the history of racial violence in Mississippi and have led some to question whether justice will be meted out equally. …

That a local judge’s family member is one of the last people to be pictured with Wells hasn’t helped quell suspicion of the case’s handling, according to some community members who spoke with the Guardian. Cole, who has said that her family has been receiving death threats,

Cole is the judge whose white son was a friend of the dead youth. The Coles have been getting death threats from people who believe Crump’s racist blood libels.

wrote on Facebook that she and her family were cooperating fully with authorities and will “do everything within our power to assist Nolan’s family in their quest for answers”. She said that her family would not be speaking to the press at this time.

The Jackson county sheriff’s office said it interviewed witnesses in the days and weeks after Wells’s death. The state and an independent medical team organized by Wells’s family and the high-profile civil rights attorney, Ben Crump, completed autopsies of Wells’s body. Though the results of the state’s autopsy have not yet been revealed – Jackson county’s district attorney, Angel Myers McIlrath, said they would not be released until a grand jury is convened – the Wells family released the results of their independent autopsy on 22 July.

At the NAACP’s national convention in Chicago, Crump revealed that the state had turned over the body with Wells’s throat missing, and also said there was significant red discoloration along the back of his neck and head. The cause and date of death were both inconclusive.

In other words, Ben Crump’s hired coroner couldn’t come up with anything that even Ben Crump’s hired coroner would stand by.

“We are in Mississippi,” Crump said weeks ago. “These were three young white men. Nolan was the only young Black man. Had the roles been reversed, we know this investigation would be going differently. It would be like The First 48. They would be interrogating those young, Black boys.” (The Jackson county district attorney’s office has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment.)

Crump is just asking questions.

Most recently, investigators hired by the family are looking into audio released by the Mississippi department of marine resources of a distressed phone call one of Wells’s friends made to a local boat company on 4 July. The person who made the call can be heard saying that the boat was sinking.

The case has received national interest – with figures such as the social justice activist the Rev Al Sharpton, the former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the film-maker Tyler Perry stepping in to support the Wells family. Kaepernick paid for the independent autopsy, Perry paid for Wells’s funeral, and Perry and Sharpton are offering a monetary reward for information.

In the absence of answers, some social media users and community members are trying to fill in the gaps themselves. “We are not getting any information or updates around the investigation, the progress of the investigation from either Jackson county sheriff’s department or the Jackson county DA’s office,” Lea Campbell of the Mississippi Rising Coalition, a civil rights organization, said. “We are left to fill a vacuum. There’s a lot of information being shared across social media, and it’s hard for folks to know what to believe and what not to believe.” Some, including Crump, have likened Wells’s disappearance and death to the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was murdered in Drew, Mississippi.

Of course they did.

… Last year, Ocean Springs, where Wells was from, was voted the “friendliest small town on the Gulf Coast” by World Atlas, a publishing resource for geography and travel. The town is nearly 80% white.

It’s nearly 80% white. And we all know what that means.

Nobody will ever be able to rest easy until that percentage is approaching zero.

Some locals painted a different picture, as tensions across the Gulf coast are “definitely heightened”, Campbell said. “Given the historical context here in Mississippi around the deaths of Black people and the white power structure in Mississippi, protecting white folks who have committed violence against Black folks or killed them, it’s understandable that folks don’t have a lot of trust at this point,” she said. “We want, and folks want, answers. Folks deserve answers. There’s a lot of anxiety that can’t be separated from the context of Ocean Springs itself.”

The Mississippi Rising Coalition was active in the statewide fight to change Mississippi’s state flag, which, until 2020, had a Confederate battle emblem on it, Campbell said. During those efforts, the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist and domestic terrorist hate group, threatened the activist organization. “There was a lot of racism that surfaced publicly then,” Campbell said. “This tragedy does not exist in a vacuum.

“The Jackson county sheriff came out very shortly after the body was discovered and made a public statement that no foul play was suspected,” Campbell added. “Then you have the state medical examiner who sends the body to the independent pathologist for an independent autopsy and doesn’t send the throat. Then you have the Jackson county DA coming out and giving a very nicely worded statement to all of us, lecturing us to have blind trust … Layer all of these things in and it’s no wonder this is getting the attention that it’s getting – it should be.”

That context and history are personal for John H Whitfield, a Black pastor who grew up on the coast near where Wells lived. As a boy, Whitfield said his parents told him to stay out of Jackson county. He recalls a memory from his childhood where a Black man was picked up by police in Jackson county, allegedly for driving while intoxicated. “He never walked out of that jail,” Whitfield said. “They said he hung himself and nobody ever believed that. You can’t look at these things in silos and isolation.”

In an effort to make sense of the distrust and skepticism from the local Black community about the case, Byron D’Andra Orey, a political science professor at Jackson State University, points to “a theory known as ‘racial threat’”. It argues that areas with a higher concentration of Black people have the most punitive laws and the most violent crimes. The state’s history, he said, was inextricable from how people, both in and out of the state, are responding to what happened to Wells.

“We’ve seen various incidents where justice was not handed down,” Orey said. “Violent incidents as it relates to violence against Black people – because it’s not just Black men, but Black people in this country. In many instances, we don’t see any justice. So when people see this nationally, and then to see that it’s Mississippi, folks have doubt as to whether or not justice will prevail. This is a pattern that’s occurred throughout the country and it’s a residual that people still sit with. People come in with a predisposition that Black lives do not matter, so we do not expect for justice to prevail.”

The search for Wells and his death were a “breaking point”, said Ash Dawn Caranna, an organizer of MS Gulf Coast Human Rights Organization. “We just experienced the pain and loss of a one-year-old baby in Senatobia, Mississippi, Kohen Wiley,” Caranna said of the Black child who was killed by a Senatobia police officer outside a Walmart on 14 June. “With the attention that was already being put on Mississippi, once we saw the situation with Nolan, it kind of reached a boiling point for people here. Nolan Wells was deeply, deeply loved, even by people that didn’t know him.”

On 30 July at a conference for the National Urban League, a civil rights organization, Wells’s parents and Crump were joined by the families of two other Black 18-year-old boys who died under suspicious circumstances.

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

But in this century, you mostly seem to hear about them in their newer role as Thought Policemen, arresting a Brezhnev Era-like hundreds annually for intemperate social media posts on immigration and ethnic controversies.

I’ve always wondered if the UK’s current system of two-tier policing only persecutes working class whites, who might conceivably riot? Or are classier whites also in danger of being asked to come with the police down to Headquarters to assist them in their inquiries.

And what about foreigners who post online while visiting the UK? Should you avoid vacationing in Britain in case you might forget where you are and post some excessively honest IQ stats on X while within His Majesty’s domain?

In Times Higher Education, the leading trade paper covering British academia, reporter Jack Grove speaks about the police and legal intimidation that led to the spiking of his big story ago that would have blown wide open the Jason Arday Scandal nine months before Nathan Cofnas spilled the beans.

I was reported to police over the Arday case. I was just doing my job

My investigation into alleged plagiarism was undertaken seriously – journalistic enquiries should not be a matter for Scotland Yard, writes THE reporter Jack Grove

Published on August 5, 2026

Jack Grove

Jack Grove is a reporter and deputy features editor at Times Higher Education.

Twitter: @jgro_the

… I was shocked to hear it was from the Metropolitan Police, asking me to call them back. Why? Nothing remarkable had happened to me in the previous year. When I rang back the officer explained a complaint had been made against me regarding the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but the matter was now closed.

But it was important, the officer explained, that I didn’t contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.

However, I hadn’t emailed Arday in four months – my last direct email had been in September, offering formal right of reply to allegations that he had plagiarised his PhD.

That allegation was not made lightly: I had assembled a 63-page report which detailed how he had apparently used, without proper citation, huge chunks from a thesis written in 2009 by another student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a highly respected education academic at Brunel University of London. Further checks found passages that seemed to be lifted from the work of researchers based in the US, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the UK. In total, I submitted 97 pages of evidence to both Cambridge and Arday’s awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores University, for their investigation.

Serious allegations, certainly. Deeply embarrassing and distressing, definitely. Although Arday was eventually cleared of plagiarism by an LJMU review, a frenzy of coverage led to Cambridge opening an investigation into Arday’s academic record and CV, followed shortly afterwards by Arday announcing his resignation.

But were my inquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics. …

But maybe my journalistic pursuit of this story was too “incessant”, as Arday has claimed, hounding him about details on his personal biography that had little bearing on his academic role, as he suggested.

In fact, …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

No paywall on this post, so free subscribers may comment.

Substack, for unexplained reasons of its own, does not let its creators, such as me, choose any options for commenting on posts with a paywall partway through them other than:

So, no paywall on this post and everybody may comment.

In general, I’m happy with Substack. But they could work a little harder to enable us writers to finetune the Substack experience as they see fit.

Anyway, back to breaking Jason Arday News:

From the Good Law Project, which was hosting the letter in support of Jason Arday, a [former] full professor at the University Cambridge (like, say, Charles Babbage or Paul Dirac), here’s an announcement by Dr. Arday:

Latest 5 August 2026

An update from Jason Arday

Dear colleagues,

It is with profound sadness that I write to resign, with immediate effect, from my position at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College.

When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life. To become the youngest Black professor in the University’s history was something I could scarcely have imagined as a child growing up with a diagnosis of autism, unable to speak until I was eleven years old.

The response from so many people across the world was overwhelming. Thousands celebrated not simply my appointment, but what it represented: that talent, perseverance and hope can triumph over even the greatest adversity. It has been the privilege of my life to teach my students, to learn alongside them, and to witness their curiosity, kindness and ambition. They have given me far more than I could ever have given them.

Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great.

I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.

For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away.

This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.

To my students: thank you. Teaching you has been the greatest honour of my academic career. Your brilliance, compassion and determination give me enormous hope for the future.

To my colleagues and to the many thousands of people, from every corner of the world, who have supported me, defended me, written to me, and believed in me when it mattered most, I offer my deepest gratitude. Your kindness has carried me through some of the darkest moments of my life.

This is not the end of my work. It is simply the end of this chapter.

I need time to heal. I need time to simply be myself again.

And when that time comes, I will return.

I will return stronger, wiser and with the same determination that has always defined my journey. There is still so much work to do, and I look forward to doing it alongside so many of you in the years ahead.

For now, however, I ask only for understanding, for compassion, and for the space to begin again.

With gratitude,

Professor Jason Arday

Meanwhile, The Telegraph points out that a book that Arday has several times maybe, sort of claimed to have written did not go through the formality of coming into existence:

From The Telegraph:

Jason Arday resigns after Telegraph reveals his false book claims

Professor announces he is quitting Cambridge ‘with immediate’ effect after university launched investigation

Albert Tait

Education Editor

Updated 05 August 2026 8:39pm BST

Published 05 August 2026 2:19pm BST

Prof Jason Arday has resigned from the University of Cambridge after The Telegraph revealed he falsely claimed to have published a book.

In a letter online, Prof Arday said he was resigning “with immediate effect” from his position at the university and also Jesus College citing “unrelenting level of public scrutiny”.

The statement came hours after the university announced it was investigating him following new information regarding his “academic qualifications and honorary appointments”.

Earlier on Wednesday, The Telegraph also revealed that Prof Arday had repeatedly claimed that he was the author of a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse.

The book was listed in his biography description in published essays as well as promotional material for speaking events, and was attributed to the Palgrave Macmillan publishing house.

In reality, it was never published. …

The universities of Glasgow and Ohio State have denied claims by Prof Arday that he had been a visiting professor at their institutions.

It was revealed by The Telegraph that Prof Arday has incorrectly claimed to be a visiting professor at the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. On the Cambridge Faculty of Education page, he claims to be a visiting professor at the university, in the city of Gqeberha, formerly Port Elizabeth.

However, a university spokesman said Prof Arday had “no formal affiliation” with the institution and had served as an adjunct professor on a fixed-term association that ended in November 2025.

Adjunct professors are usually part-time and hold more junior positions than visiting professors.

Cambridge previously said Prof Arday was the victim of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility”, but had faced a staff revolt over its refusal to re-examine his academic credentials. …

Palgrave Macmillan confirmed to The Telegraph that the project had been abandoned several years ago, although a spokesman would not comment on why.

Well, now that he’s relieved of teaching all those courses, grading all those papers, and researching all those landmark breakthrough studies of his, he’ll have time to write Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse.

I’m sure the world will greatly benefit from Dr. Arday’s novel insights.

On the other hand, AI is amazingly adequate at writing these days. And the standards for prose style in fiction are rapidly declining as women take over the novel business, as writers, readers, and publishers.

For example, from Macmillan Publishers’ latest DEI statement:

Not surprisingly, scandals are erupting lately as hot novelists are accused of using AI.

Below is from the Guardian news section. Like so many articles these days, this one starts out boring but gets fun toward the end:

$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use

Agents withdraw Jerry Falade’s hotly anticipated debut after saying they can no longer authenticate ‘how the manuscript evolved’

Emma Loffhagen

Fri 31 Jul 2026 12.45 EDT

A high-profile publishing deal for a debut crime novel has collapsed after doubts emerged over whether artificial intelligence played a role in writing it.

The hotly anticipated manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, by Jerry Falade, was withdrawn from sale by its agent despite reportedly receiving an offer for more than $2m (£1.5m) from Minotaur, owned by Macmillan US, as part of a 14-way auction. The plan was to publish it in 2028.

An email sent to publishers by Falade’s agents and seen by the Guardian said: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.”

It continued: “During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

The US auction was run by the author’s agent Marc Gerald of Europa Content, according to the Bookseller. In the UK, Sandy Hodgman of Hodgman Literary is said to have secured several six-figure bids through a similarly competitive process. The Guardian has approached both agents for comment.

Gerald told the Bookseller he first read the book in June, and that it was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.”

He said that halfway through the submissions process, an editor raised concerns that the book had signs of potential AI use. Gerald said Europa opted against using AI-detection software to check the manuscript, saying Falade was “clear and credible” in his explanation.

However, after a meeting on 29 July, when “aspects of [Falade’s] story changed”, the agency decided to cut ties, citing the “need to have total faith”.

“We feel terrible for putting this into the universe and the firestorm it has caused,” Gerald added. “The book itself is genius – however it came to be drafted, it’s amazing.”

Falade’s case is the latest in a string of controversies to hit publishing this year, as authors, agents and publishers grapple with how to handle suspected AI use in manuscripts. Earlier this year, Hachette pulled the US release of Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl after rumours circulated online that the author had relied on AI, something she denies.

Okay, let’s learn about Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl. From Wikipedia:

The novel follows Gia, a depressed woman with obsessive–compulsive disorder, who encounters a mysterious man named Nathan while looking for a sugar daddy to ease her financial troubles. Nathan offers to erase all of Gia’s debts in exchange for her agreeing to live as his pet. Living like an animal convinces her that she is becoming an animal, making her behave like one.

Are women developing a fetish for reading about bestiality these days, the way they are also into fantasizing about ice hockey players going at it gayly?

After the British publication, critics and readers began to make claims that the book appeared to have been written by generative AI. … A two-and-a-half-hour video essay covering the book, created by channel frankie’s shelf, titled “i’m pretty sure this book is ai slop”, received 1.2 million views on YouTube by March 2026.

In response, Hachette Book Group announced in March 2026 that it would cancel the book’s US publication and discontinue its UK publication. It told The Wall Street Journal that it had made “a lengthy investigation” before deciding to cancel the book. Ballard told The New York Times that she had not used AI when writing the book, but that AI-generated elements were added by a freelance editor without her knowledge. She also stated that she could not elaborate on her claim because she was pursuing legal action against the editor.

Back to the Guardian on the Jerry Falade Brouhaha:

In a statement to the Guardian, Falade rejected claims that he had used AI and said the response reflected …

OK, here’s where the good stuff starts:

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more

I started writing about Arday on July 26.

Around then, he became a big story in the right-of-center British press like the Telegraph, Times, and Daily Mail.

Over the weekend, the left-of-center Guardian weighed in with a devastating article by Lanre Bakare, “Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor,” that, after starting out as if it were going to blame Arday’s troubles on rightwingers pouncing, then revealed even more of Arday’s paranoid fantasies.

But for the first couple of weeks, almost nobody in the U.S. news media dared touch the Arday story.

When I’d point that out, some people would respond that nobody in America would care about some overseas college scandal.

After all, how many Americans have ever heard of the U. of Cambridge, when there are so many more famous universities in this world, such as Oxford, Harvard, and … and … uh … lemme get back to you on my list of more famous universities than Cambridge. I promise.

And who has ever been on the Cambridge faculty? I mean, besides Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, C.S. Lewis, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and, now, Jason Arday?

Finally, after a couple of weeks, the New York Times has decided the Arday story is fit to print.

The NYT’s story is structured in its usual upside-down format where the opening paragraphs won’t undermine the median subscriber’s worldview, while a later section gets into some of the interesting facts. Newspapers used to put the important news at the top of an article, but the marketing department at the NYT didn’t get 13 million paying subscribers by letting reporters offend the customers who really don’t want to know.

But toward the end the article goes into heavy duty conspiracy theorizing mode, alleging “broader concerns about the ways accusations of plagiarism are being weaponized.”

Nathan Cofnas is denounced some more. Chris Rufo’s takedown of the absurd ex-president of Harvard, Claudine Gay (post-presidential compensation in 2024: $1.5 million), is cited as evidence of a pattern of targeting of black academics rather than as evidence of blacks often being promoted into posts over their heads during the recent Racial Reckoning.

The unexpected thing, however, is that the headline and subhead may give away the the more critical second part of the article. It appears that Arday blew off a scheduled interview with the NYT, so they may be personally mad at him.

Questions Mount Over a Star Scholar’s Life and Career

A knife-wielding masked man. A pig’s head outside his parents’ door. Running 30 marathons in 35 days. The Cambridge professor Jason Arday, accused of plagiarism, says he’s been through it all. Not everyone believes him.

To you and I, this sounds pretty harsh toward Arday. After the left-of-center Guardian unloaded on Arday, the Times can’t defend him. The case is now closed in the eyes of any objective observer.

You can tell the NYT isn’t sure how hard they want to commit to this Arday guy because he isn’t pictured next to a window with a pensive look on his face.

But a lot of the 13 million paying subscribers will glance at Arday’s smiling black face and think, “How dare they question a star black scholar?”

The NYT hasn’t reached its dominant position in the Internet Age’s news media by undermining its paid readers’ world-views.

By Jennifer Schuessler and Alexandra Alter

Aug. 3, 2026, 8:08 p.m. ET

For Jason Arday, it has been a breathtaking climb to the top of the ivory tower.

Raised in South London by Ghanaian immigrant parents, Arday says he was diagnosed with autism at age 3, was nonverbal until he was nearly 12 and couldn’t read or write until he was 18. He went on to get his Ph.D. in education, and claims to have had to relearn the contents of his dissertation weeks before defending it after losing his memory following the removal of a benign brain tumor.

In 2023, when he was 37, Arday became the youngest Black professor at the University of Cambridge in its history. That appointment, trumpeted by Cambridge, inspired a spate of glowing media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic highlighting his dramatic life story, including his claims to have once run 30 marathons in 35 days to raise millions of British pounds for charity.

Arday has also told the press that his academic successes brought darker attention, including the delivery of a severed pig’s head to his parents’ home and repeated visits to his office by a masked intruder, once while wielding a knife.

Next week, Simon & Schuster will publish Arday’s memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” under its 37 Ink imprint. In the lead-up to the book’s publication, Arday has found his academic integrity and claims about his biography increasingly under fire.

Concerns about some of Arday’s work had circulated quietly in scholarly circles since the appointment at Cambridge catapulted him to academic celebrity. But they exploded into public view late last month, after a scholar known for racist views about intelligence published a lengthy article in his newsletter questioning parts of Arday’s remarkable personal story and leveling extensive charges of plagiarism against him.

The link in the NYT goes to Nathan Cofnas’s 2020 article in Philosophical Psychology entitled “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry.” Here’s Cofnas’s abstract:

In a very short time, it is likely that we will identify many of the genetic variants underlying individual differences in intelligence. We should be prepared for the possibility that these variants are not distributed identically among all geographic populations, and that this explains some of the phenotypic differences in measured intelligence among groups. However, some philosophers and scientists believe that we should refrain from conducting research that might demonstrate the (partly) genetic origin of group differences in IQ. Many scholars view academic interest in this topic as inherently morally suspect or even racist. The majority of philosophers and social scientists take it for granted that all population differences in intelligence are due to environmental factors. The present paper argues that the widespread practice of ignoring or rejecting research on intelligence differences can have unintended negative consequences. Social policies predicated on environmentalist theories of group differences may fail to achieve their aims. Large swaths of academic work in both the humanities and social sciences assume the truth of environmentalism and are vulnerable to being undermined. We have failed to work through the moral implications of group differences to prepare for the possibility that they will be shown to exist.

Racist, I tell you, racist!

Between you and me, of course, this Arday Fiasco sounds exactly like the kind of consequence Cofnas was talking about.

But that just makes Cofnas more racist. Or something. I mean, who thinks about such things? Sure, the extremely well-documented racial gap in average IQ would appear to a Man from Mars to be the skeleton key that unlocks countless conundrums that befuddle American Earthlings about their own society.

But that’s why you aren’t supposed to know about it.

Back to the new NYT news (i.e., supposedly not opinion) article:

The accusations quickly drew widespread media coverage in Britain, which initially broke down along familiar culture-war lines. To the right-wing media, Arday was a “diversity poster boy.” To supporters, including prominent academics and politicians who signed a petition of support that quickly drew thousands of signatures, he was the victim of a racist smear campaign.

Let’s not overstate how ardent the left-half of opinion in Britain was in defense of Arday. White leftists mostly seemed to want the whole thing to go away.

Of the 38 initial signatories of the Good Law Project’s letter standing up for Arday, only 6 were white. And how prominent were they? I don’t know much about Britain lately, but I only recognized the names of 2 of the 38: Green Party leader Zack Polanski and autism research Simon Baron-Cohen (comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen’s kinsman).

But over the weekend, as questions about his work and personal story continued to mount, a different debate emerged. Is Arday a victim of a campaign to discredit Black scholars? A fabulist whose tales of extreme adversity the academic establishment deemed too good to check? Or both?

So far, Arday’s publisher and university have stuck by him, even as the media has surfaced other questionable assertions — like an apparent claim in a 2022 interview that he had been part of the British documentary series that included the film “Seven Up!,” which began before he was born.

As I pointed out over the weekend.

The Daily Mail today features Arday’s new explanation for why he said he was in Seven Up, which is roughly the Ken Burns’ Civil War of British TV documentaries:

Last night Professor Arday said that when he talked of ‘Seven Up’, he didn’t mean ‘Seven Up’ the famous TV series, which followed children at seven-year intervals in the format he described. He says that in fact he was referring to ‘a local community and parent-led initiative developed around the Ubuntu principle that “it takes a village to raise a child”.

‘It was organised by Black women to support Black mothers raising children with complex learning needs.’

He asked that we attribute the quotes to ‘a source close to Professor Arday’.

‘The reference to “Seven Up” was used informally as a shorthand illustration of the concept. It was not intended as a literal comparison and should be understood in the context in which it was made. Attempts to present the phrase in isolation risk creating a misleading impression of both the initiative and Professor Arday’s comments,’ Professor Arday said.

It’s kind of like how I was in “Lawrence of Arabia” in 1962 with my good friends Omar, Alec, Anthony, and Claude, under the guidance of David.

What?

You are saying I was only 4 years old in 1962?

Yeah … well, … you know … look, it was like this: “Lawrence of Arabia” was what David, the high school boy who supervised our after-school playgroup in the local park’s sandbox, called us kids.

I never did figure out who Lawrence was.

… Arday has attempted to clarify or defend many of his claims, including that one. But at times, his responses have added to the controversy.

In an interview with The Times of London published on Friday, Arday appeared to acknowledge some errors in his early work, but blamed them in part on his autism

Is there any evidence that Arday has autism other than that his IQ is much lower than you’d expect for a Cambridge professor? For example, he seems like …

Subscribe now

Paywall here.

Read more