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
Hurricane Lala battered Hawaii’s Big Island with heavy rains and strong winds this weekend, killing at least one person and causing an estimated $3 billion in damage. But what if we could have steered it away from American soil? Evan Gardner reports on a recent scientific paper arguing that “atmospheric nudging” could enable us to manipulate the path of tropical storms; the start-up founder who says, “in principle, it’s not that crazy complicated”; and the experts who disagree.
On Friday, Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty in federal court to stalking that resulted in the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Notably, he did not plead guilty to murder. Now, his lawyers could argue that, because Mangione has already pleaded guilty to killing Thompson, the Constitution’s protection against being tried twice for the same crime means New York can’t try him for murder, when his state trial begins on September 8. Is that a legitimate legal argument, or an attempt to walk away on a technicality? Jed Rubenfeld breaks it down.
Seth Dillon spent years fighting to restore free speech on social media—for the sake of comedy. Now, the founder of The Babylon Bee thinks that fight created a problem he didn’t anticipate: a culture with the freedom to say anything, built on a growing willingness to believe nothing. He joins Coleman Hughes on the latest episode of “Conversations with Coleman” to discuss why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were harder to parody than Donald Trump, and what happens when the internet is free but nobody can tell what’s true.
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
A man was charged with hate crimes after disrupting Friday night Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, striking a congregant and headbutting a security guard, before being detained by an off-duty police officer. Services continued Saturday with additional police posted outside.
Ukraine launched one of its largest drone assaults of the war yesterday, killing at least six people across Russia. Russia struck back with missile attacks on Ukrainian cities. In a CBS News interview, Ukraine’s recently fired defense minister said the country could be hitting Russia with domestically built ballistic missiles in the next few months.
On Saturday, Moroccan police arrested more than 100 people attempting to breach Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, as both countries brace for another mass migration after social media posts began circulating calling for a new attempt. Two weeks ago, a surge of over 72,000 migrants entered the territory. At least 96 people died. (For more on the crisis unfolding in Ceuta, read Aidan Stretch’s on-the-ground dispatch.)
A powerful storm system tore through Indiana this weekend, killing at least six people and leaving neighborhoods underwater as residents navigated flooded streets by kayak and rowboat. Governor Mike Braun said he had spoken with President Trump and that federal disaster relief was on the way.
A shooting at a park in Lexington, Kentucky, on Saturday left one person dead and four others injured, among them a 4-year-old and a 14-year-old. Police have not named a suspect but say the public is not in danger.
Iran’s parliament approved a bill Sunday requiring government permission for any contact with foreign media and imposing a ban on giving interviews to American or Israeli outlets, punishable by up to two years in prison. The measure still needs to clear Iran’s Guardian Council before becoming law.
A 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia on Saturday, killing at least 53 people and forcing around 5,000 to flee their homes. It is the country’s deadliest quake since 2022. In the hardest-hit areas, rescue teams are still working to clear rubble where people may remain trapped.
Jinny Lu, a 6-year-old pug found abandoned in a box in South Korea, was crowned the World’s Ugliest Dog on Friday at the Sonoma County Fair, in her fourth attempt at the title. The floppy-tongued champion takes home $5,000 and a trip to New York for a Today show appearance scheduled for later today.
“On Saturday, Moroccan police arrested more than 100 people attempting to breach Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, as both countries brace for another mass migration after social media posts began circulating calling for a new attempt.”
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The Democrat Migrant swarms will only stop when this sentence includes the term ‘machine guns’.
Arday suffered from a myriad of comorbid mental health issues, (PS autism is not a mental health disorder, it is merely a different operating system) none of which the powers that be sought to help him with because his existence fit into a narrative that made them all feel good about themselves. Instead they pushed his delusions and ignored his academic inadequacies. This story is tragic on so many levels, not the least is that those who rose Arday up quickly abandoned him to the mob in order to save themselves. They should not be allowed to get away with that. Everyone responsible for this societal failure needs to be held accountable.