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| By The Free Press |
It’s Monday, August 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: What if we could control hurricanes? Seth Dillon on the unintended winner of the free-speech wars. Jed Rubenfeld on Luigi Mangione’s legal escape hatch. And much more.
But first: The tragedy of Jason Arday.
On Friday, Jason Arday, the British academic who had been celebrated as the University of Cambridge’s youngest black professor, was found dead in his London home at the age of 41, in what is widely believed to have been a suicide. He had resigned days earlier, after being engulfed by scandal over allegations that he had fabricated elements of his personal story and plagiarized portions of his academic work. His memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, had been published that same week.
“If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic,” wrote Zarah Sultana, a left-wing Member of Parliament in the UK, “he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Ibram X. Kendi, the prolific purveyor of “antiracism” who rose to fame during the racial reckoning of 2020, wrote an essay titled: “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.”
In his essay today, Douglas Murray argues that this is “manifestly, sinisterly untrue.” It was not reporters who failed Arday, but the people who elevated him to a position for which he was unsuited. In reading Great and Unfortunate Things, Douglas found “a terrible list of people purportedly telling him what a godlike force he is.”
Elsewhere in our pages, Yuan Yi Zhu wrote about the people who had to lose for Arday to win—deserving scholars passed over as Cambridge promoted a man whose work went unscrutinized, while academics who dared to challenge him were threatened. Meanwhile, John McWhorter examined how Arday’s appointment was itself a form of racism—a culture so eager to laud a black academic that it never asked whether his work merited the praise.
“It seems clear by now that Arday had a deluded sense of himself,” writes Douglas today. “The question is whether the delusions came more from himself or from the countless flatterers he met throughout his life.”
—The Editors
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The Scientists Who Want to Steer Hurricanes | |||||
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Mangione Pleaded Guilty to Stalking. He’s Still on the Hook for Murder. | |||||
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The Lie That Killed Comedy for a Decade, with ‘The Babylon Bee’ CEO Seth Dillon | |||||||||
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