Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.

He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.

Last month, Nathan Cofnas—a former Cambridge researcher who may politely be described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ, and who may impolitely be described as a professional racist—published in his newsletter what appeared to be significant evidence of Arday’s plagiarism. This month, as it became apparent that much of the Arday legend was most likely just that, the academic became an object of international obsession, especially in British media and on X. He resigned from Cambridge last week, though this did not stem the flood of attention.

The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.

What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.

[Read: Icarus in the faculty lounge]

Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”

Then those on the racist right—frothing with glee that they took no trouble to conceal—pressed their advantage, punch-drunk on the double intoxicant of incandescent liberal hypocrisy and a Black man’s failure. The mob swelled, online and in the media. Some people joined out of perfectly legitimate indignation at the apparent obliteration of academic standards that the ordeal attested to. Some joined out of ghoulish pleasure at seeing a beneficiary of DEI, as they cast him, cut down to size.

Everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.

[From the September 2026 issue: Why I quit the tenure track]

I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further. I have always found such encounters stomach-churning. But I can also imagine—if you came up hard and are unaccustomed to kindness—how good it might feel, and how tempting it might be, to do and say things that make people give you that look again and again, whether or not the things you’re saying are strictly true.

Two images have rattled around in my head since the news of Arday’s death. The first is from a 2023 BBC clip celebrating his hiring at Cambridge. Cremin, Arday’s Cambridge colleague, clasps both of his hands in the manner of a cherished loved one as they stare into each other’s eyes. The camera zooms in on their white and Black hands interlocked and lingers there. The second image was posted on X last night: a screenshot of a list of article headlines about the Arday scandal, stretching to several pages, published by one British outlet alone. It represents but a few watts of the international spotlight that had been trained on the academic.

I have been dwelling on these two images—the theatrical interracial handclasp; the pages and pages of monomaniacal media coverage of what was ultimately a niche academic scandal—because together they speak to a terrible reality. Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.

The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.

To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.

Around the same time yesterday afternoon that I learned of Arday’s fate, I came across another piece of news: an announcement that Ross Barkan, a white novelist and journalist, had just been dropped by New York magazine after the publication—having investigated allegations regarding dozens of instances of plagiarism in Barkan’s writing—concluded that his work “did not live up to our editorial standards.” Swiftly afterward, Barkan announced that he would now focus on writing a new column at The Nation, another venerable outlet, where he will get a very public second chance.

It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.

These have to be some of the most remarkable sports photos of all time: a 20-year-old Lionel Messi bathing a five-month-old Lamine Yamal.

Two of the best football players in the world, one a Barcelona legend and another a Barca legend in the making. Both came up through the ranks of the club’s La Masia youth academy. Both wore number 19 for Barca before switching to the number 10. And if Argentina can advance past England in this afternoon’s semifinal match, the two will face each other in the World Cup final on Sunday. It’s like if there was a photo of Muhammad Ali holding Mike Tyson as a baby. Remarkable.

And the way the photos happened is completely random; Yamal’s family didn’t have footballing connections or anything like that. The photos were taken by photographer Joan Monfort in 2007 for a UNICEF fundraiser (UNICEF was the jersey “sponsor” for Barca’s 2007-2008 season).

“UNICEF did a raffle in the neighbourhood of Roca Fonda in Mataro where Lamine’s family lived,” said Monfort. “They signed up for the raffle to have their picture taken at the Camp Nou with a Barca player. And they won the raffle.”

“He [Messi] didn’t even know how to hold him at first,” Monfort said, recalling the difficulties of the shoot. “Messi is a pretty introverted guy, he’s shy. He was coming out of the locker room and suddenly he finds himself in another locker room with a plastic tub full of water and a baby in it. It was complicated.”

More from Monfort in The Athletic:

“It’s the most famous photo I’ve taken in my life, by a long way. So many people have been interested, again during this World Cup now. If Lamine keeps growing like he is growing, the photo will be even more historic. The chances of all this happening was like winning the lottery. Although it’s not sorted me out financially for life (laughs).

“I’m just really happy it happened. It’s especially nice in today’s football, when so much is to do with money and power.”

Tags: Joan Monfort · Lamine Yamal · Lionel Messi · photography · soccer · sports

A code of principles proposed at the 1889 National Hobo Convention:

1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
7. When jungling [camping] in town, respect handouts and do not wear them out; another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
8. Always respect nature; do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully. Take no personal chances. Cause no problems with operating crew or host railroad. Act like an extra crew member.
12. Do not cause problems in a train yard; another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities – they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed; you may need their help someday.
16. If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it. Whether for or against the accused, your voice counts!

The convention was held by Tourist Union #63, a union of hobos created in the mid-1800s. Members sought to resist anti-vagrancy laws by representing themselves as itinerant workers rather than idle miscreants.

Well, that was interesting.

Some quick thoughts below the cut.



So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe.  There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly.

One is Left / green concern about emissions.  Unlike a lot of Left / green concerns, this one doesn’t stop at hand-wringing.  It tends to go straight to moral condemnation and direct action.  A surprising lot of northern European greens view aircon as somewhere between “acceptable only in the direst of needs” and “just inherently very wicked”.

Another is a strain of what I can only call machismo.   Find an online discussion about aircon, and within a few comments you’ll find the guy — it’s always a guy — who wants you to know that he was with British Forces Arabian Penninsula at Aden back in the day, and nobody had ever heard of this aircon nonsense, and they were just fine, damn your eyes.  Or the guy — it’s always a guy — who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like and with real brass fittings, warm in winter and cool in summer, add a ceiling fan and that’s all a man should ever need. 

Related to that last one is Anything But Aircon.  You see, if you just install a geothermal heat pump, and get better insulation, and plant trees around the house and ivy on outer walls, and add awnings and external shading, and paint your roof white, and get double- glazed windows with louvers, and a ceiling fan in every room, and fill your living spaces with large house plants, and also sleep with a mattress topper and 100% breathable linen or high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, then you should be completely fine.

Yet another is, not exactly anti-Americanism, but defining-us-against-Americanism.  Those huge malls — icy cold, I needed a sweater!  Have you heard they have stadiums that are air-conditioned?  And ice in their beer!

Apropos of that last point.  Here’s a temporal heat map of London:

and one for New York City:


— But NYC has a relatively mild climate by North American standards.  Here’s Kansas City:



In Kansas City, nature is actively trying to kill you quite a lot of the time.  There’s literally no place in Europe, from Cornwall to the Urals, that has a climate as extreme as Kansas City.

And these are the temperate parts of the USA — the bits where average temperatures are comparable to much of Europe.  I’m not even going to bother with maps from Houston or New Orleans or Los Angeles.  

Do Americans overuse aircon?  Oh yes, we absolutely do.  But do we need aircon?  Also yes.  Most of us do, at least some of the time.   There are a couple of corners of the country where it rarely gets that warm — upper New England, a strip along the Pacific coast, the airier bits of the mountain West.  But around 80 percent of the US population lives in places where summers without aircon are not just unpleasant, but actively bad for mental and physical health.   99% of homes in Houston have aircon.  And if you’ve ever spent a summer in Houston, that statistic will leave you wondering how there can possibly be 1% that don’t.

On the positive side, the US has built about all the aircon it’s going to.   

This is very much not the case around the world! Here’s a projection of the growth of aircon worldwide.