Don’t let grifters kill the university
The Jason Arday scandal blew up because it captures a sense of grift that now seems endemic in British higher education. His employment at Cambridge was the coup de grâce,…
‘Woke One’ derailed my life
In 2022, I lost a trivia-hosting gig at a brewery over the word “Nicaragua.” No, I wasn’t a shock comic workshopping race material; I was reading a geography question aloud…
Drought is pushing England to the brink
The heat is somehow different — prickly, dry, searing. The fields have turned a strange desert-like khaki, and the endless blue above is empty of clouds. The sheep and cattle…
The Right’s favorite Left radical
In the spring of 1979, Jimmy Carter set a place at his table for a radical historian: Christopher Lasch. The author’s book The Culture of Narcissism, published a few months…
Can old-school Malta endure?
Perched on Europe’s southernmost edge, Malta is an object lesson in the folly of lazy essentialism. A Catholic nation where devotees invoke Allah, the islands are home to Europe’s only…
Somali pirates are back
It’s Groundhog Day in the Gulf. I use an American reference as it’s an American-made calamity. After weeks of stop-start progress, 14,000 of the estimated 20,000 seafarers who had been…
Jason Arday: a question of academic standards
Amid much attention to Jason Arday’s plagiarism and advanced Walter Mittyfication, the gobbledygook of his writing style has been largely overlooked, not least by the professorial electors at Cambridge and…
Watching Trump’s Apocalypse
A certain kind of helplessness has always been part of our arrangement at the movies. After all, we did nothing to save Marion Crane. That poor, pretty woman had been…
The chew toy that ate my small business
Two summers ago, a 61-year-old blind woman I’d never met sued me for allegedly injuring her. Her accusation: I had impeded her ability to buy a Snugarooz Floos N’ Fun…
Bach’s lesson for the AI age
I’m not much of a mathematician which may seem a surprising admission for a statistician. However, the question of whether “Statistics” (the discipline, with a capital S) is a field…