On October 19, 2026, Albertans will vote on whether their province should secede from Canada. Except that isn’t quite right. Albertans will vote on whether the province should “commence legal proceedings” in order to hold a binding referendum on whether the province should leave Canada.

In other words, Alberta will hold a referendum on whether to hold another referendum on whether the province should secede from Canada. The farcical nature of the referendum aside, the prospect of Albertan independence raises the question of what might happen should Alberta decide to leave.

Although Alberta has never previously voted on whether to secede from Canada, other provinces, notably Québec, have held sovereignty referendums. The sovereignty question has long dominated provincial politics in Québec, with political philosophers weighing in on the ethics of separatism.

One longstanding argument in the debate over Québec separatism concerns how the province could be partitioned upon leaving Canada. Opponents of separatism have said that if the Québécois have the right to national self-determination, then other apparent national communities in Québec would have the same right to secede from a sovereign Québec, which would lead to it being partitioned.

This regress argument against the principle of national self-determination begins by asking one to assume the validity of the principle. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that nations are entitled to demand that the borders of the political state that governs their members align with the boundaries of their nation. This entitlement entails the right for national minorities within a state to secede or separate from that state at any time by just withdrawing their consent to be governed.

Now, suppose that a national minority elects to exercise this right and secede from the state to which they belong. After conducting a successful referendum, the territorially concentrated national minority secedes from the original polity. However, upon achieving its independence, the new state is confronted by a group who constitutes a national minority in the new state, and who also demand their independence.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau—fifteenth Prime Minister of Canada and political theorist in his own right—offered the following presentation of the regress argument:

Thus, the conclusion of this regress argument is that the consistent application of the principle of national self-determination results in a level of political instability that renders states nonviable. In the least, the argument is a reductio ad absurdum, as the practical implications are unacceptable. Moreover, the argument could also be understood to demonstrate that national self-determination is self-defeating, if its end goal is understood to be the creation of an independent nation-state. The instability that results from this principle would make forming a cohesive nation-state impossible.

In 1995, the Canadian province of Québec held a referendum on whether to become an independent country. This sovereignty referendum was the culmination of a long historical process that reached back to before Canadian Confederation. Québec is the only province in Canada with a francophone majority, although significant francophone minorities are found in the English-majority provinces.

The 1995 Québec sovereignty referendum narrowly failed by a margin of 50.58 to 49.42 percent. The results of the referendum are helpful in this discussion because they illustrate how the province might be partitioned were Québec to gain independence. The leftmost map in the above illustration depicts the entirety of the province, and it is immediately striking that the majority of the people in the northern Ungava region opposed separatism, because this region has two-thirds of the province’s landmass.

Opposition to separatism in northern Québec was driven by Indigenous communities, such as the James Bay Cree and Inuit. The maps on the right side of the illustration depict metropolitan centers and areas along Québec’s border with other provinces. In South Québec, Hull, and Montreal, there are significant anglophone populations who also overwhelmingly opposed Québec sovereignty. These groups are thus plausible candidates for national minorities that would exist in a sovereign Québec.

If the principle of national self-determination were consistently applied, presumably these national minorities could vote to secede from a sovereign Québec. Some contemporary Québec separatists, such as provincial political party Québec solidaire, do concede that other groups in Québec possess this right to national self-determination.

The most salient difference between the cases of Alberta and Québec is that the former is not often conceived of as a distinct nation. If being a national community is a prerequisite for having the right to national self-determination, then it is not clear that Alberta would possess such a right. Instead, Albertan separatists typically claim that Alberta’s moral right to self-determination is grounded in purely democratic terms. Regardless of whether a province constitutes a distinct nation, its citizens have a right to vote to secede from Canada.

However, if Alberta is understood to have a right to self-determination that is not based on a claim to nationhood, then the regress argument has even more power. In the Québec case, the James Bay Cree and anglophone minorities have been raised as presumptive national minorities with the right to self-determination, but if nationhood is not a prerequisite, any given group of people could elect to secede. In other words, if the right to self-determination is purely democratic—simply a matter of a territorially concentrated group of people voting to leave—why cannot Edmonton, Lethbridge, or Red Deer simply vote to secede from Alberta? Denying those cities that right would be arbitrary.

Pierre Trudeau once observed: “Si le Canada est divisible, le Québec doit être aussi divisible” (“If Canada is divisible, Québec must also be divisible”). Given the principle of self-determination being invoked in debates over Albertan separatism, this is even truer for Alberta than for Québec. Should Albertans one day choose to secede from Canada, we should expect the province to be partitioned.

I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? extro? No, he’s just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.

— David McCord

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.