From The New Yorker:
The Real Meaning of the Jason Arday Scandal
In a young Black professor’s academic misconduct, a “race-realist” found a “hook for a story.”
By Lauren Michele Jackson
August 19, 2026
In Facebook, The New Yorker finds that its Jason Arday story is greeted with amusement.
Last month, the self-styled “race-realist” Nathan Cofnas posted a Substack accusing Jason Arday, a Black professor at Cambridge, of plagiarism. Then the media and online spectators began digging into Arday’s life story—as he’s told it, he was diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder when he was three, did not speak until he was 11, and could not read or write until he was 18—and found some of his claims specious.
“Some,” mind you, some.
On August 5th, Cambridge announced that it had opened an investigation; Arday resigned that day. Last Friday, he was found dead in South London. He was 41.
“Other prominent figures have been received with levity when their stories have unravelled in public,” Lauren Michele Jackson writes. “But Arday was not greeted as a risible scammer endemic to the times. Suspicions surrounding this person demanded an exorcism.” Jackson considers the gleeful fascination with the Arday scandal, and its tragic outcome: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/xuiv01
The public was indeed full of George Santos-level levity:
Paywall here.
