The Syllabus

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Rothblatt Memorial Education Fund paid for eight Wednesday nights in the social hall at Beth Israel of Pico, coffee and rugelach included, and printed a flyer with a photograph of a barbed wire fence at dusk.

Sy Rothblatt (b. 1948) had made his money in commercial carpet and had given the shul its memorial wall, which runs eleven feet along the lobby and holds four hundred and six names in brass. His mother came out of Bergen-Belsen at nineteen weighing seventy-one pounds. The donor plaque under the names is in a larger typeface than the names.

Rabbi Dov Kalman (b. 1966) suggested Grossbard because Grossbard was the most learned man in the neighborhood and because the last series, on the parsha and leadership, had drawn nineteen people.

Sixty-two came the first night. Grossbard had a lectern, a stack of eight paperbacks, and a single sheet of paper he did not read from.

He began by saying that they were going to study a market.

He gave them Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) in twenty minutes. A catastrophe becomes a catastrophe when a group of people make a claim, and the claim has four parts. You must represent the nature of the pain. You must represent the nature of the victim. You must establish the relation of the victim to the wider audience, which means you must make the audience say, that could have been me. And you must assign responsibility, and therefore meaning, and redemption.

“Four representations,” he said. “Every memoir you have ever been given performs all four. Tonight I want you to notice that this is a performance requirement and that requirements have costs. Somebody pays them.”

A man named Feldstein asked whether he was saying the Holocaust was a construction.

“The killing was not a construction. Nothing about the killing was a construction. What we do with the killing is a construction, and it has been constructed by people with names, working for institutions with budgets, and I intend to introduce you to some of them.”

The room liked this. There is a pleasure in being told you are about to be shown the back of the set. Sixty-two people went home feeling they had signed up for something.

He handed out the reading list at the door. Eight weeks, thirteen books. Nobody looked at it closely under the fluorescent lights of the lobby, and the ones who did assumed the famous ones were coming later.

Week two he gave them what he called the control group, and he was generous.

Halina Birenbaum (b. 1929), who went in at ten and came out at fifteen, whose book has been read by more Polish and Israeli schoolchildren than any other testimony, who has spent fifty years on the March of the Living and answers every letter a teenager sends her. Rena Kornreich Gelissen (1920-2006), who went to Auschwitz on the first women’s transport and organized her whole account around a promise she made her mother about her sister, so that three years of atrocity resolve into one obligation a fourteen-year-old in Encino can understand. Edith Hahn Beer (1914-2009), who survived by marrying a Nazi Party member in Munich and being a good German wife. Heda Kovály (1919-2010), who came out of Auschwitz into Prague, whose husband was hanged in the Slánský trial in 1952, and whose book therefore says that the machine has more than one operator.

“These are true books,” he said. “Being true is not what got them onto your daughter’s tenth grade reading list. Look at what they share.”

He listed it. A victim who can be identified with. A pain that can be represented without disgust. A relation to the audience that widens rather than narrows. An assignment of responsibility that lands on someone outside the room.

“Hold those four. For the next six weeks I am going to show you books that fail.”

Mrs. Ruchie Zelikow (b. 1954), whose mother came from Mukachevo and had the number, said from the third row, “Fail them according to who?”

“According to the buyer.”

“And who’s the buyer?”

“You are,” Grossbard said. “That’s the course.”

Week three was the procedural, and the room went down to fifty-one.

Miklós Nyiszli (1901-1956) was a Hungarian pathologist who survived by performing autopsies for Josef Mengele on bodies delivered from the gas chambers, including the bodies of the twins he had examined alive the week before. He describes the dissection room. He describes the equipment, which was good equipment. He describes the working relationship, which was in a certain register cordial. He describes the day the Sonderkommando found a sixteen-year-old girl alive under the bodies and revived her and could not save her.

Filip Müller (1922-2013) spent almost three years in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau and wrote the operations down. The airtight doors. The time from the pellets to the silence. The way the bodies were found, the strongest at the top, the children and the old at the bottom, because of what happens in a room when people climb. The hair. The teeth. The rotation of the shifts. What the Sonderkommando ate, which was better than what everyone else ate.

Grossbard read four paragraphs of Müller aloud in the social hall and then closed the book.

“Notice what did not happen in you just now,” he said. “You did not identify. You cannot identify with a man who has just told you the operating procedure for the door. The third representation failed. Alexander’s third leg. There is no relation established between that victim and this audience, because you will not permit yourself to occupy his position for even a sentence.”

Feldstein said, “So we’re supposed to say we would have done it.”

“You are supposed to notice that the book will not let you say you wouldn’t.”

A woman near the coffee said she had come to a class about survivors and this felt like something else.

He gave them Borowski, and read the paragraph where the narrator eats while the transport unloads, and a man in a Dodgers cap got up and went to the parking lot and did not come back.

Week four was Olga Lengyel (1908-2001) and Gisella Perl (1907-1988), and week four was where it broke.

Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Cluj who went to Auschwitz with her husband, her parents, and her two sons. On the ramp she was asked how old her older boy was and she made him younger, because she believed younger meant lighter work. She sent her mother with him to keep him company. She writes it down. She writes that she killed her son and her mother by her own hand and gives the reasoning she had at the time, which was decent reasoning made out of the information she had, which was none.

Perl was a gynecologist from Sighet who performed abortions on the dirt floor of the barracks at night, without instruments, because a pregnant woman went to the gas. She estimates the number in the hundreds. She wrote that she saved their lives by taking their children’s, and then she went to New York and delivered three thousand babies at Mount Sinai and said a prayer before each one.

Grossbard put the two books next to each other on the lectern.

“Perl can be canonized and has been, a little, because her act is legible as sacrifice and the responsibility for it lands on the Germans. Lengyel cannot, because Lengyel made a decision on a ramp with her own mouth and the sentence in the book is in the first person and she does not ask for absolution. The apparatus can carry a woman who did a terrible thing for others. It cannot carry a woman who made a mistake.”

Mrs. Zelikow stood up. She did not shout.

“My mother chose,” she said. “On the ramp. She was nineteen and they asked her about her sister and she answered and she was wrong, and she told me once, in 1979, in the kitchen, and never again, and she died in 2011, and I have never said it out loud in a room with other Jews in it in my life. And now I have.”

Nobody moved.

She sat down. She came every week after that, including the weeks when there were eleven people.

Week five, a woman named Dara Weisbrod asked the question during the break, standing by the urn with a styrofoam cup.

“Rabbi, forgive me. When do we do Night?”

“We don’t.”

She waited for the rest of it.

“We don’t do Night,” he said. “We don’t do Anne Frank (1929-1945). We don’t do Frankl (1905-1997). We don’t do Levi (1919-1987). Not one word for eight weeks.”

“That’s a joke.”

“No.”

“You’re teaching a Holocaust class and you’re not teaching Elie Wiesel (1928-2016).”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

And he gave her the answer he had prepared, which was a good answer and was not the true one. He said that they had all had those four since the sixth grade, that there was nothing he could add to a book that had sold ten million copies and been read aloud in this building, that a syllabus is a statement about scarcity and those four are not scarce. He said he wanted to run a controlled experiment on a Wednesday night in Los Angeles: take away the material that does the work automatically and find out what happens in a room when the books refuse to do it.

Dara Weisbrod said that sounded like a stunt.

“It might be,” he said.

She put the cup in the trash and went home at the break and the second half had forty-one people in it.

Week six he gave them Rudolf Vrba (1924-2006), and the class stopped being about taste.

Vrba escaped from Birkenau in April 1944 with Alfréd Wetzler and produced a thirty-two page report on the killing operation, with maps, with the layout of the crematoria, with the arrival figures, and got it into the hands of the Jewish leadership in Slovakia and Hungary before the Hungarian deportations began. Four hundred and thirty-seven thousand Hungarian Jews were deported anyway, in eight weeks, on schedule, without resistance, believing they were going to work.

Vrba spent the rest of his life saying that the leadership had the report and did not warn the communities, and that the reason involved a negotiation between Rezső Kasztner and the Germans over a train of sixteen hundred and eighty-four people, and that the people on that train included Kasztner’s family and the Jewish notables of Kolozsvár.

“He was right about the report,” Grossbard said. “The document existed and reached them. What he was right about after that is contested and has been litigated, in Jerusalem, in a courtroom, in a case that brought down a government, and I am not going to settle it in a social hall. Here is what I want you to see. Vrba performed all four of Alexander’s representations at a level nobody has matched. His pain is documented. His victimhood is total. His relation to the audience is heroic, an escape, a warning, a man running through the woods with the numbers in his head. And on the fourth representation, responsibility, he pointed at us. And the apparatus that ought to have made him the most famous Jew of the twentieth century made him a difficult figure, a bitter man, a professor of pharmacology in Vancouver.”

Feldstein said, “You’re saying the Judenrat killed the Hungarians.”

“I am saying that a memoir which assigns any portion of responsibility inward gets no distribution, regardless of its accuracy, and that this is a rule you can observe operating in every memory regime on earth, including the Rwandan one, where I have watched it operate at close range.”

Sy Rothblatt was in the back that night. He had not come to the first five.

In the parking lot he said, “Shlomo, I want to ask you something and I want a straight answer. Whose class is this?”

“Mine.”

“It’s my mother’s.”

“Sy.”

“I gave that money so people would remember. You’re teaching them to audit.”

“Remembering is auditing. There’s no third thing.”

Rothblatt looked at the lit windows of the social hall. “My mother watched her father give a watch to a kapo for nothing. Nothing. The man took the watch and walked away. She talked about the watch more than she talked about her father.” He put his keys in his hand. “You think I don’t know what you know?”

“I think you know it and have decided it should not be said in a room with a coffee urn.”

“That’s right,” Rothblatt said. “That’s exactly right. And that’s not stupidity, that’s a judgment, and I’ve had forty years to make it.”

Fourteen people came to week seven.

He gave them Ruth Klüger (1931-2020), who went in at eleven and came out and became a professor and then wrote a book that attacks the memorial industry from inside the survivor position, that says the camps taught nothing, that says the sentimental German penitent is a species she can smell across a room, that refuses to be anyone’s occasion for feeling.

He gave them Jean Améry (1912-1978), who wrote that the man who has been tortured stays tortured, that the trust in the world is not restored, that he retains his resentment and considers his resentment a moral achievement, and who took his life in Salzburg in 1978.

He gave them Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985), who came back with what she called useless knowledge and put it in fragments because the sentences would not connect, and Imre Kertész (1929-2016), who wrote that the worst part was that it was survivable and that survival is banal and that the word for the thing he did in Buchenwald is not resistance but habit.

Fourteen people. Mrs. Zelikow in the third row. A young man named Ari Fromowitz in the back who had come every week and never spoken.

“Notice,” Grossbard said, “that these four are respected. Klüger has a chair. Kertész has the Nobel. Delbo is taught at Yale. The apparatus does not suppress them. It admires them and does not use them. Nobody puts Améry on a wall. Nobody prints a Delbo fragment on a program at a commemoration. There is a category we should have a name for, which is the honored and inoperable.”

He heard himself say it and thought about a book with four hundred and eleven copies sold.

Week eight was the counterfeits and there were eleven people, and Rothblatt was one of them.

Binjamin Wilkomirski (b. 1941), who was Bruno Grosjean, a Swiss Protestant boy who was never in a camp and who wrote a childhood in Majdanek that won prizes in three countries and was taught in schools. Misha Defonseca (b. 1937), who walked across Europe with wolves. Herman Rosenblat (1929-2015), who met his wife through the fence at Schlieben, apples every day for seven months, and told it on daytime television twice and sold it to a film company.

“Every one of these was believed by professionals,” Grossbard said. “Editors. Prize juries. Historians. Survivors. The frauds were not caught by the apparatus. They were caught by outsiders, late, and in each case the apparatus resisted the correction. Ask why.”

He waited.

“Because a counterfeit is manufactured to specification. Wilkomirski’s book performs the four representations more efficiently than any true memoir can, because a true memoir is encumbered by what happened and a fabrication is free to supply demand. Rosenblat’s fence is impossible. There is no place along that fence where a boy could stand and a girl could stand. Every specialist who looked at the map knew inside a minute. It ran for fourteen years anyway, because a Jewish boy and a Jewish girl and an apple through the wire is what the market was ordering, and here is a man willing to fill the order.”

He put his hand on the stack of paperbacks.

“For eight weeks I have shown you the supply the market would not clear. Nyiszli. Müller. Lengyel. Vrba. Klüger. Améry. And I have shown you that the market cleared a Swiss Protestant with a fabricated childhood at a hundred thousand copies. That is the finding. The filter does not run on truth. It never has, in any nation, about any atrocity. It runs on what a community needs to keep being the thing it is, and the community is not lying when it does this, and neither are you, and neither am I.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Mrs. Zelikow said, “Can I say something to you.”

“Please.”

“You didn’t leave out those four for us.”

He waited.

“You keep saying experiment. Controlled experiment, you said, in week five, I wrote it down. It’s not an experiment. You left them out because you wanted them punished. Because they got everything and your people got nothing, and you had a room and a lectern for eight weeks and you took it out on the dead.”

Rothblatt, in the back, laughed once, at the ceiling.

Grossbard stood at the lectern in the social hall with the coffee urn cooling behind him and the barbed wire flyer still taped to the door and understood that she was correct in every particular, that she had seen it from the third row in week two and had sat through six more weeks to be sure, that he had built the syllabus out of a grudge against a man with a Tony and an Oscar and a medal, and that the syllabus was also true. Both. The way it had been in the church with the second take.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, that’s what I did. And every book on that list still belongs on it.”

Mrs. Zelikow gathered her coat. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I came back.”

Rabbi Kalman did not renew the series. He was decent about it and said the room had not been right, which was true. Rothblatt’s fund sponsored a scholar in residence from Yeshiva University the following winter on the theme of resilience and drew two hundred and ten people, and the shul put out a nicer flyer.

In March, Ari Fromowitz emailed. He was twenty-four, he worked at a hedge fund in Century City, he had gone to a Modern Orthodox day school where they read Night in ninth grade and again in eleventh.

He wrote that he had bought all thirteen books. He wrote that he had finished Müller on a Sunday and gone for a four hour walk. He wrote that he had one question and would understand if there was no answer.

He wrote: if the filter is real, and if my community will only carry the versions that flatter it, then what was I supposed to do with the eight weeks. I can’t unread it. I can’t teach it. Nobody I know wants it. What is it for.

Grossbard read the email four times and typed a long answer about interpretive communities and deleted it, and typed a shorter one about Alexander and deleted that too.

What he sent said: It is for you. That is the only market it has. You will find two or three others in your life and you will know them within ten minutes of meeting them and you will not be able to explain to your wife why those two or three matter to you so much. That is the community. It has no building and no fund and no flyer. Come learn Wednesday nights if you want, eight o’clock, my table, no coffee.

Fromowitz came the first Wednesday. He came the second Wednesday.

He did not come the third.

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The Work of That Day

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Reznick Family Foundation bought premium economy for eleven rabbis and coach for the videographer. Rabbi Chaim Portnoy (b. 1944) paid the difference for business out of the shul discretionary fund and did not mention it at the gate, though he mentioned the leg, which had been operated on twice.

They flew LAX to Brussels to Kigali in April 2014, the twentieth year. Marla Teitelbaum from the foundation had a binder with tabs. The tabs said Nyamata, Ntarama, Murambi, Gisozi, Reconciliation Village, Free Afternoon. There was a page of talking points and a page listing which memorials permitted photography.

Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard (b. 1951) sat in 22C with a paperback of Borowski he had read four times. Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) had been dead longer than Grossbard had been alive. Across the aisle Rabbi Aryeh Kestenbaum (b. 1963) slept sitting up with his hands folded, and even asleep his chin was at an angle that would have read well from the back of a room. Kestenbaum had been a chazzan in Forest Hills for nine years before semicha. He had the instrument. Everyone knew he had the instrument.

At Brussels, waiting on the connection, Rabbi Yoni Setton (b. 1975) asked Grossbard what he was reading.

“A Polish writer. He worked the ramp at Auschwitz.”

“Worked it how?”

“Unloading. Carrying. Sorting.”

Setton thought about that. “A Jew?”

“No. A Catholic. Political prisoner.”

“So he had it better.”

“He had it better,” Grossbard said. “That’s the book.”

Nyamata is a brick church with a corrugated roof and holes in the roof where the grenades went through. Ten thousand people died there over two days in April 1994. The pews hold the clothes. The colors have gone to the same color, which is the color of dust that has been rained on and dried many times. Down the steps behind the altar there is a crypt with shelves of skulls and shelves of femurs, arranged by size.

The guide was named Emmanuel. He was thirty-five and he had been fifteen. He gave the tour in English with a vocabulary that had been sanded by repetition into something almost pleasant to listen to. He said the number. He said the two days. He said the priest and the mayor. He pointed at the altar cloth, which is stained, and at a metal rod in a case, and he said what the rod had been used for.

The rabbis stood in the aisle in their black shoes.

Kestenbaum went forward alone. He put his hand on the back of the last pew and stood there for maybe forty seconds and then he sang El Malei Rachamim.

Grossbard had heard the prayer six hundred times. He had said it himself at more funerals than he could count. Kestenbaum sang it in that church and the sound went up into the brick and came back down, and Emmanuel, who had heard everything, stopped moving. One of the Kigali drivers took off his cap. Rabbi Duvid Lasker, who was thirty-one and had eleven thousand followers, put his phone down at his side without switching it off, so that the video that later circulated has ninety seconds of Kestenbaum’s voice over a shot of Lasker’s shoes.

When it was over nobody said anything for a while. Then Terry Ochoa, the videographer, said, “Rabbi, I’m so sorry, I had you backlit. Is there any way.”

Kestenbaum’s face was wet. He said, “Of course.”

He walked back to the last pew and put his hand on it again and stood for about forty seconds and sang it again, and it was better the second time.

That is the sentence Grossbard would spend eleven years trying to write.

And Grossbard, standing there, understood something about himself that he had no use for. He wanted the forty seconds. He was fifty-two years old, he had published four books with academic presses and a hundred and forty essays, he had spent thirty years telling graduate students that no interpretation stands outside the community that authorizes it, and what he wanted in that church was to be the man at the front of it with the instrument.

At Murambi the school buildings sit on a hill above Gikongoro with a view that costs money anywhere else in the world. Fifty thousand people were told to gather there for safety. There was no water. There were no latrines. On April 21 the soldiers and the militia came up the hill.

They keep some of the bodies. They were buried in lime and the lime preserved them, and now they lie on tables in the classrooms, white and small, in the positions they were in. Children with their arms up. A woman with her legs drawn.

Rabbi Ephraim Katz went out and sat on the step and did not come back in.

The French built a camp on the hill afterward, during Turquoise, and they put in a volleyball court on top of a grave.

Portnoy said, “The French.”

Setton said, “Everybody.”

Grossbard asked the guide what the memorial paid the survivors who came to give testimony to visiting groups. The guide said it depended. Grossbard asked what it depended on. Teitelbaum touched his sleeve and said that they were behind schedule.

That night at the hotel in Kigali, which had a pool nobody used and a buffet with a carving station, they sat at a long table and drank Fanta and Primus.

Kestenbaum said, “We have an obligation to bring this home.”

“Bring what home,” Grossbard said.

“Shlomo.”

“What is the object of the verb.”

Setton laughed.

“The witness,” Kestenbaum said. “We came here. Almost nobody in our world has come here. We stand in the church, we say the words, and then we go back and we say to our people, it happened again, it happened while we were watching television, and we said never again and it meant nothing.”

“That last part is correct,” Grossbard said. “It meant nothing. It’s a phrase that has never described anything. It’s a noise a community makes to signal that it chosen.”

“You want to say that from the bimah?”

“I want to say what’s true from the bimah.”

Portnoy put down his glass. “Yoni, tell him what they’ll fund.”

Setton shrugged. “A trip. They’ll fund another trip. Bring the eleventh graders. Everybody cries at Nyamata, the parents get a slideshow, the foundation gets a report with photographs.”

“And that’s contemptible?” Kestenbaum said. He had the patience of a man who has never in his life needed to raise his voice to be listened to. “Shlomo, a boy from Valley Village stands in that crypt at seventeen. Something happens in him. You think that’s nothing?”

“I think something happens in him,” Grossbard said. “I think what happens in him is that he learns his own people’s suffering is the model for all suffering, and that he is on the right side of it, and that he has now discharged an obligation by feeling something on a Tuesday. And I think he will go home and be a slightly better person for about five months.”

“Five months is five months.”

“It is,” Grossbard said.

Later, walking back to the rooms, Kestenbaum caught up to him in the corridor. He said, “I’m not the fool you think I am.”

“You are a performer,” Grossbard said. “So am I. Mine plays to forty people.”

On the fifth day they went to the prison at Mpanga and then to a reconciliation village where men who had confessed in gacaca lived on the same road as families of the people they killed. This was Teitelbaum’s tab that said Reconciliation Village, and there was a session with tea, and a woman spoke about forgiveness, and a man spoke about repentance, and the rabbis asked questions about teshuvah and whether the Rwandan model had an analogue in halacha, and Lasker got a photograph of two hands, one of each.

Afterward Grossbard walked out past the tea and found a man sitting on a plastic chair by the wall, out of the sun, not part of the program. He was maybe sixty. His name was Théoneste. He had done eight years.

Grossbard sat down on the ground next to the chair, and asked him about the days.

Théoneste talked about the days.

There was a whistle in the morning, around seven. You went to the roadblock or you went with the group to the marshes. If you went to the marshes you took a machete and you took a bottle of water because it was hot in there and the papyrus was over your head. You worked until eleven or twelve and then it got too hot and you came out and you ate. Some men brought food from home. Some men ate what was in the houses. In the afternoon you went back in for a few hours and then you stopped around five because the light was going and you could not see in there after five. In the evening there was beer. The cows were the good part. If you were early you got a cow, and the cows were finished in the first two weeks, and after that there were only the goats and the sheet metal off the roofs.

He said the marshes were the hardest because of the mud and because people hid under the water and you had to look for the reeds moving. He said a man from his cell in prison had a bad shoulder from that month and still had it.

Grossbard asked him if he had known the people.

Théoneste said he had known all of them. He named four families. He said one of the men had lent him a bicycle pump.

Grossbard asked him what he had thought about while he was doing it.

Théoneste looked at him for the first time, the way you look at a foreigner who has asked something that has no answer, and said, in French, that it was the work of that day.

Le travail de ce jour-là.

Grossbard wrote it on the inside cover of the Borowski.

Kestenbaum’s essay ran nine days after they landed. Eleven hundred words. It ended with the roof of Nyamata and the light coming through the holes. His shul put it on the wall by the office. A network booked him. He was good on television, better than good, because he sat still and let his face do it, and afterward people wrote to him and said they had never seen a rabbi like that.

Grossbard wrote four thousand words. An editor he had published with twice asked for three changes. Cut the section about the payment schedule for survivor testimony, because it read as an accusation against the memorial and would be used by deniers. Cut the paragraph about the delegation’s own budget, because it read as an attack on a foundation that was doing good work. And soften the ending, which said that everyone in the church that morning, including the eleven men in black shoes, was made of the same material as the men in the marshes, and that the difference was position and not character.

Grossbard said he would cut nothing. The piece ran on his own website on a Thursday and got two hundred and forty readers.

He went back four times on his own money. He learned enough Kinyarwanda to know when the translator was smoothing. He interviewed a hundred and ninety-three people over seven years, sixty-one of them confessed killers, and he kept tape logs because he had been trained by an argument and he knew what an argument requires.

The book took eleven years. It is called The Work of That Day. It runs three hundred and forty pages and there are no photographs.

It has the flat register. It describes the marshes the way Théoneste described them, hour by hour, with the water bottles and the heat break and the light at five. It has the economics. It has the price of a machete in Kigali in 1993 and where they came from and how the import numbers rose. It has the cows. It has forty pages on gacaca that annoyed everyone who worked on gacaca, because he wrote about the incentive to confess and the discount for confession and the men who confessed to a good story. It has an appendix on the memorial economy, the per diems, the honoraria, the delegations, the number of foreign groups Nyamata received in a year and what the guides were paid.

And it has the delegation. Chapter nine. He put the eleven of them in the church, in their shoes, and he put Ochoa asking for the second take, and he put Kestenbaum’s throat, and he wrote the sentence about the second take being better and the man meaning it both times.

Then he wrote about his own community’s use of its own catastrophe. He wrote that the practices are identical in structure, that a canon of witness had been assembled out of the accounts that could travel and that the accounts that could not travel had been admired and shelved, and he named which ones. He wrote that the phrase never again had always functioned as a membership card. He wrote that he had carried the card his entire life and had gotten a career out of it.

The agent he had used for the fourth book returned it in six weeks. She said the writing was extraordinary. She said she could not think of the reader.

A university press in the Midwest took it and printed a first run of eight hundred.

The launch was at a bookstore on Pico on a Sunday evening in November. Eleven people came. Six were from his shul and four of those left before the questions. A woman asked whether he thought there was anything redemptive in the story he had told, and he said no, and there was a pause, and the moderator asked about his research methods.

The book sold four hundred and eleven copies in the first year.

There was one review, in a Belgian journal of African studies, by a scholar who called it the most accurate account in English of the operational texture of the hundred days and noted with regret the author’s insistence on inserting himself.

His shul held a kiddush that month for a boy’s aufruf and nobody mentioned the book. The conversation went to the parking situation on Beverwil, and then to a hospital case, and Grossbard stood by the herring and understood that he was watching a functioning organism route around an object that had no use.

His oldest friend on the board took him aside in the parking lot and said, “Shlomo. I read it.”

“And?”

“It’s the best thing you’ve written.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t teach it here.”

Kestenbaum spent three months writing One Hundred Days. He opened at a nonprofit theater downtown and moved to a two-hundred-seat house and then, in 2019, to Broadway.

It runs ninety minutes with no intermission. He plays six people. He plays Emmanuel. He plays a woman who survived under bodies for two days. He plays a French officer. He plays a killer. He plays a rabbi from Los Angeles who arrives with a binder. And at the end he stands at a wooden rail in a light the color of the light through a brick roof and sings the prayer.

The reviews used the word necessary. He won the Tony in 2020. HBO filmed it in 2021 and it played on a Sunday in April and the network put up a resource page. The film version won the Academy Award for documentary feature in 2023, and Kestenbaum, in a tuxedo, said thirty seconds of the survivors’ names and then sat down, which everyone agreed was the right call. In 2025 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the citation said he had taught a generation the meaning of never again.

Grossbard watched the HBO broadcast at home with a cup of tea going cold.

The killer Kestenbaum plays crouches. He breathes through his mouth. His eyes move to the side and he says the word cockroach three times and something happens to the muscles of his face on the third one.

Kestenbaum had gone back twice himself, which nobody knew, and he had a folder of interviews he never used. And out of all of it he had built the version that a country could receive.

Grossbard turned off the television and sat in the dark and thought about interpretive communities, which he had lectured on since 1983.

He had told students for thirty years that there is no standing outside a practice, that the criteria by which anything is judged good are internal to the community doing the judging, that nobody reads from nowhere. He had believed he was a realist. He had assumed that his own standing was a report on the quality of his mind.

It had been a match. His supply had happened to fit a demand. In 1988 the demand had been for a young Orthodox scholar who could talk about hermeneutics to people who were nervous about hermeneutics, and he had supplied it, and he had been paid.

Now he had written the truest thing he would ever write and there was no demand and there was no argument he could make against no demand, because you cannot argue with a market from inside a book the market has not bought.

Portnoy died in March 2026 in Chicago. Grossbard flew out.

At the cemetery the wind came off the lake and the men held their hats. Kestenbaum was there in a black coat, and there were two people with him who were not family and who stood at the edge of the crowd looking at their phones.

Afterward, in the parking lot, Kestenbaum came over.

“Shlomo.”

“Aryeh.”

They talked about Portnoy for a while.

Then Kestenbaum said, “I read your book three times.”

“That’s more than the Belgian.”

“I have it in my bag right now. I’ve had it in my bag for four years.”

“Why?”

Kestenbaum looked out at the stones. “Because I can’t use any of it.”

“I know.”

“I’ve tried. There are nine pages in there I would give a year of my life to have written, and I have stood in a rehearsal room with them and there is nothing to do with them. You put them onstage and the audience goes quiet, and you have lost them.”

Grossbard put his hands in his coat pockets. “Do you believe what you say on that stage?”

“Every word.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Kestenbaum laughed, one syllable, and then stopped. He said, “Nobody ever asked me for yours. In thirty-one years, not one person, not one board, not one foundation, not one donor, not one television producer, has ever asked me for yours. They asked me for mine before I knew I had one.”

The two people at the edge of the lot were looking over.

Kestenbaum took his hand and held it a second longer than the handshake needed. “Your book is the better book.”

“I know,” Grossbard said.

He meant it and it was worth nothing and he drove to O’Hare.

In the fall a student named Zevi came to his office, which is a corner of the beit midrash with a desk and two chairs and a window onto a wall. Zevi wanted to write. He had a subject. He asked what he should do so that people would read it.

Grossbard sat with that for a while.

“Find out what your readers need,” he said. “To keep being what they are and feel righteous about it.”

“And then supply it?”

“Then decide. If you can supply it and tell the truth, you’ll have a career and you’ll deserve it. That happens. It happened to me for twenty-five years and I thought it was virtue.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then write it anyway and don’t be surprised.” He turned the pencil over on the desk.

Zevi wrote something down.

“One more thing,” Grossbard said. “When you’re standing in the place where it happened, and a better man than you sings, and you notice that you want it to be you, put that in. That’s the only sentence in my book anybody will still use in fifty years.”

He looked at the window and the wall.

“Go learn,” he said.

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JD Vance Often Sounds Like A Podcast Bro

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Luke Ford

In “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber (1864-1920) lists three qualities a politician needs: passion, a sense of responsibility, and proportion, which he glosses as distance from things and from men. The last one is the rare one. It means letting reality work on you at some remove instead of inhabiting every idea you encounter at the moment you encounter it.

The podcast form punishes distance. The product is the process of thinking, performed live, and the audience pays in attention for the sensation of discovery. A host who says “I looked into that and it turned out to be nothing” has wasted three hours of tape. A host who says “I went down a rabbit hole on this and what I found will surprise you” has made his week. The reward gradient runs toward novelty, and novelty correlates weakly with truth. Run a man on that gradient for a few years and he acquires a taste for the unexpected claim.

Office runs on the opposite gradient. You decide with bad information, you own the decision, and the record follows you. Closure is the job. Springfield is the case study: Vance (b. 1984) defended circulating a story he had not verified on the grounds that it drew attention to a real problem. That is podcast logic applied to power. The claim is a vehicle. Its truth is a secondary property of the vehicle.

Two things cut against this reading, though.

One, the alternative failed too. The credentialed men with no taste for rabbit holes gave us Iraq, the 2008 regulatory posture, and a public health consensus that spent 2020 revising itself in public while insisting it had not. Openness to the heterodox source is a real asset when the institutional source has been wrong at scale. The question is whether a man can sample outside consensus and still discipline what he brings back, and Vance is hard to read on that because he has never had to show his work.

Two, the style may be coalition signaling rather than cognition. Vance is a Yale Law graduate who worked in venture capital and served in the Senate. He can do the disciplined thing. Speaking in the idiom of a media ecology whose audience elected him is a choice about where to stand, and it tells you less about how he processes information in a room with no microphone. His Munich speech was many things, but it was not a journey. It was a prepared position delivered to hostile listeners who knew exactly where it landed.

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The Cost of the Claim

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

A man in an office notices that his colleague leaves at three on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reports come in a week late. Nobody says anything. He asks his supervisor what the arrangement is, and the supervisor tells him she cannot discuss it. The law forbids her. So the man builds his own account out of what he can see, and his anger builds.

Adrienne Colella described this in the Academy of Management Review in 2001, in a paper on how coworkers judge the distributive fairness of workplace accommodations. She returned to it with Ramona Paetzold and Maura Belliveau in Personnel Psychology in 2004. The legal constraints that prevent an employer from explaining why an employee received an accommodation push the surrounding workers toward negative inferences about the process. Confidentiality protects one person and starves everyone else of the information that would justify what they are watching. Colella also found that invisible conditions draw the most suspicion. When nobody can see the impairment, coworkers wonder whether the person is faking to get the benefit. Paetzold and colleagues followed in 2008 on the resentment that results.

This small literature shows that resentment tracks an information deficit that the rules create. A worker who suspects the arrangement is unearned has been placed in a position where he cannot check, and the rule that forbids him from checking is the same rule that forbids his supervisor from reassuring him. The system generates the suspicion and then treats the suspicion as a defect of character in the man who has it.

What does the accommodation regime cost, and who pays?

Jason Fletcher published “Spillover Effects of Inclusion of Classmates with Emotional Problems on Test Scores in Early Elementary School” in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2010. His cross-sectional estimates showed a single classmate with an emotional problem cutting reading and math scores by more than a tenth of a standard deviation, between a third and a half of the Black-White test score gap. With student fixed effects the estimate fell to about five percent of a standard deviation, and the reading result held up less well than the math. David Figlio found similar effects using disruptive boys, identified through an instrument built on boys given girls’ names. Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra found them using children exposed to domestic violence. Neidell and Waldfogel found them using teacher ratings of externalizing behavior. Kristoffersen and colleagues found them in Danish administrative data.

Then Nienke Ruijs, writing in the Economics of Education Review, ran three separate identification strategies on Dutch data and found nothing. Students with diagnosed special educational needs had no effect on the achievement of the regular students around them.

The two sets of results fit together if you separate disruption from diagnosis. Disruptive children impose costs on the children beside them. Diagnosed children arrive with money, aides, and structure, and the resources offset the disruption. A policy that identifies a child and funds him may leave his classmates no worse off. A policy that mainstreams a child without funding him will not.

Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist published “Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act” in the Journal of Political Economy in 2001. They found the ADA reduced employment among disabled men of all working ages and disabled women under forty. The effects ran larger in medium-sized firms, which fell under the statute while small firms did not, and larger in states that generated more discrimination charges. Thomas DeLeire found the same direction in 2000 using different data. Employers priced the accommodation and the litigation risk and stopped hiring. And Acemoglu and Angrist looked for damage to the unprotected and found little evidence of any.

The regime hurt the people it was written to help and left everyone else where they were.

The cost concentrates where the condition stays invisible, the benefit stays discretionary, and the process stays hidden. Colella found the concentration twenty-five years ago. Nobody has followed it into the places where it now does the most work.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that 4.2 percent of students at affluent public schools held 504 designations, against 1.6 percent at schools where three quarters of students qualify for subsidized lunch. The national count more than tripled between 2000 and 2016. Nick Ainsworth at the University of California, Irvine published a decade-spanning analysis of state and federal data in January of this year finding wealthy families twice as likely as poor ones to secure a 504 accommodation. The pattern reverses for Individualized Education Programs, which skew poor. The socioeconomic gap in 504 rates widens as students move into middle and high school, when the payoff from extra time on college entrance exams rises. A private neuropsychological evaluation runs from a few hundred dollars to fifteen thousand.

Two systems, then, wearing one name. The affluent purchase a diagnosis that converts into extra time, a private room, a later deadline. The poor receive a designation that marks a deficit and comes with a bus. The child in the middle, whose parents have jobs and no lawyer and no fifteen thousand dollars, competes against both and receives neither.

The regime rewards documentation. Documentation costs money and requires a parent who knows the option exists. Peter Conrad, in The Medicalization of Society, tracked the moment when diagnosis stopped functioning as a label people feared and started functioning as a resource people sought. Nick Haslam’s work on concept creep, published in Psychological Inquiry in 2016, describes the downward extension of harm concepts to cover milder cases, and Cass Sunstein supplied the term for the actors who drive that extension, opprobrium entrepreneurs. Frank Furedi wrote the cultural version in Therapy Culture in 2004. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning supplied the strategic version in The Rise of Victimhood Culture in 2018, where the payoff comes from advertising grievance to a third party with power. Put these together and the picture is of an incentive structure where the people who respond best have the most practice with institutions.

The speech question follows from the confidentiality question. A dispute about who carries which load is a distributive dispute, and distributive disputes get settled by bargaining. Move the same dispute under the antidiscrimination frame and it becomes a moral dispute, settled by whoever controls the vocabulary. The worker who says the arrangement burdens him has, in the new frame, confessed to something. He learns this and stops saying it. Then the training arrives to explain to him why he was wrong to think it. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2016, found that mandatory diversity training produces backlash and leaves organizations worse off than doing nothing. The training reads to its audience as an accusation, because that is what it is.

Thomas Sowell named the posture in The Vision of the Anointed in 1995. Richard Epstein made the general economic case against the statutory apparatus in Forbidden Grounds in 1992. Neither man wrote the study I am describing. Samuel Bagenstos, who supports disability rights, laid out the internal contradictions of the movement with more candor than its critics manage, in Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement in 2009. Amy Lutz attacked the neurodiversity movement from a direction its opponents rarely take, arguing in Chasing the Intact Mind in 2023 that the profoundly autistic got written out of the debates conducted in their name.

None of these literatures cite each other. The coworker-fairness researchers do not read the economics of accommodation. The reporters covering 504 capture do not cite Haslam. The medicalization sociologists treat resentment as a stigma problem awaiting better management. And the question of what the arrangement costs the people who absorb it has no literature at all.

The absence has an explanation that belongs to the sociology of knowledge. No federal agency funds a study of the burden inclusion places on the included. No institutional review board welcomes an interview protocol that asks teachers which children in their rooms make the other children learn less. No graduate student builds a career on that finding, and the one who tried would discover that his committee, his job market, and his eventual tenure file all sit inside the same coalition. The result is a field that can measure the benefits of a policy and cannot measure its price.

An accounting would need three things. It would need the Colella finding carried forward into a period when invisible conditions dominate the accommodation caseload, with attention to what the confidentiality rule does to trust inside a unit. It would need the 504 capture data joined to outcomes, so that we learn what happens to the undiagnosed student in the middle of the distribution who competes against classmates with extra time. And it would need someone willing to publish the answer.

The first two are empirical work. The third is the hard one.

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Who owns the residual?

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

A law partnership has no outside shareholders. Whatever remains after rent, salaries, and staff goes to the partners, and the industry publishes the quotient under the name profits per partner. That number is a governance fact. It tells you who owns the surplus, and ownership of the surplus is the franchise.

The franchise is weighted by revenue. It has to be. A partnership that gave equal weight to every equity partner regardless of what he brought in would lose the rainmakers to a firm that did not, and the rainmakers know this, and so does everyone else. The weighting rarely appears in the partnership agreement in those terms. It appears in compensation, in committee seats, in who gets a return call from the chairman on a Sunday. And because revenue composition can change faster than culture, a firm can hold an election it never announced and hand power to a bloc that did not campaign.

That is the story the Times told about Paul Weiss.

In 2008 the litigators owned the surplus. The firm’s identity was theirs to buy because it was their money. The Scottsboro appeal, the assistance to Thurgood Marshall in Brown, the Windsor case, the airport deployments in 2017, the two hundred and fifty family reunifications: these were purchases made by the residual claimants out of their own residual. They bought recruiting advantages and got them. They bought prestige at conferences and in the Financial Times and got that too. They bought the pleasure of the thing, which is a real good even if no accountant books it, and a partner making two and a half million dollars a year can afford to consume some.

The consumption and the returns pointed the same way. A firm can hold values for a long time when holding them costs nothing at the margin and pays in three currencies.

Karp saw that banking work would slow. He was right. He went after private equity and mergers because the money was there, and he brought in a man from Cravath and paid him more than the veterans to accelerate it. The litigators agreed to this. They had to; the pivot funded their raises. By the early 2020s corporate work threw off 65 percent of revenue.

The electorate had changed. The new owners had different tastes in what to buy with their money.

Nothing in the account requires anyone to lie or convert. Karp did not sell out. He financed a pivot with the litigators’ consent and the pivot carried a franchise transfer. Barshay said on arrival he had no interest in leadership, and he probably meant it, because he did not need leadership. He needed votes on the Deciding Group, and revenue delivered them without his asking. When he told a table of young litigators at Marea that he was running the firm already with Karp more as a puppet, and that he liked the arrangement because he could hold the power without the daily tedium, he was describing the setup accurately. The elevation of Barshay to chairman after the Epstein documents surfaced is a formality that recorded a transfer already complete.

Korberg surveys employees and pushes for three days a week in office. Barshay pushes for five, mirroring the banks and funds his group serves. Korberg wins. Read the outcome and you might think the litigators still held the room. Read the call itself, on Mother’s Day, a head of corporate law telephoning a partner to press a point about attendance, and you see a man testing whether the franchise had moved yet. It had not, quite. He tested again the next year with questions about billable hours and pro bono ratios, and partners who could have told him it was not his business instead arranged a briefing.

Idaho, 2023. The state makes gender transition care for minors a felony. The ACLU and Paul Weiss sue. Barshay learns the firm will be named in the release and demands the name come out. He gets it, and gets prospective approval rights over all such releases. This is a lawyer whose clients bear the reputational cost claiming a veto over the publicity, and the veto is granted because he is paying. Karp’s fix was to have the firm’s name added to the ACLU’s website after the fact and his own name added as counsel of record, which is what a chairman does when he can no longer deliver the substance and still wants to deliver something.

The 2023 address to partners says it aloud. Pro bono made the country more fair and burnished the firm’s reputation over generations, and many of you came here for it, and the firm has since recruited lawyers with divergent political sensibilities, and we are a commercial law firm and not a public interest advocacy organization, and there is a war, and being in that war is not good for business. Karp proposed keeping the core work and being sensitive about which matters the firm promoted. Read that as a chairman describing the new electorate to the old one and negotiating the terms of the reduction.

Korberg’s exit. Three million in compensation over a final year of pro bono and mentoring, then another year’s salary at roughly three and a half million, in exchange for a promise not to sue, not to disparage, and not to reveal that a deal existed. The firm was buying back a claim on its own story. It bought it out of the same surplus that had funded the story in the first place, which tells you the values and the settlement were always denominated in one currency. Whatever else the firm believed about Korberg, it priced the risk that Korberg would speak, and it paid, and it did not investigate what four people said Barshay had been saying behind Korberg’s back.

The website fight in March 2025. The Center to Combat Hate page comes down around the time of the White House deal, and partners argue over what can go back up. Dunn wants it restored unchanged and says the comparison between versions will be the problem. Bonvino wants it back with major changes and asks whether they are going to hand it to Boris or Miller for review. Then the solvency statement: last week was miserable, the firm was saved from the brink, the firm should take no risks, there likely won’t be a next time if we get hit again. These are partners arguing over how much of a purchase they can still afford after a margin call. The page went back up without the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers work.

Dunn’s proposed abortion rights case in the same weeks is the same argument at a larger denomination. She wanted to buy back independence with a lawsuit. Karp was lukewarm. Barshay was opposed. The purchase was declined, and Dunn left in May with Rhee and two others, and the Deciding Group tilted further corporate by their leaving, which is how these transfers compound.

Then the DJI withdrawal, which came before any executive order. In October 2024 the firm sued the Pentagon for a Chinese drone maker. After the election Barshay argued on a call that the firm should not stand adversarial to the government. In December the firm withdrew. The spokeswoman says the decision would have been made regardless of party. Perhaps. The timing tells you the new owners had already begun repricing the portfolio.

The Oval Office meeting in March 2025 follows from all of it. Four firms fought similar orders and won injunctions from angry judges. Paul Weiss’s leaders believed they could win too. Winning was not the constraint. Karp’s own reasoning, as reported, was that a favorable ruling would not stop an administration stocked with loyalists from refusing to deal with his lawyers, and more than three quarters of the firm’s clients held government contracts. Meanwhile partners on the corporate side were taking calls from rivals and saying so. A firm whose surplus depends on M&A cannot spend a year as the government’s named adversary, and the men who generate that surplus were the ones voting. Forty million in free legal work was the number that cleared the market.

Karp landed Apollo in 2011 as the opening move of the corporate pivot, and Apollo became the firm’s highest paying client. Through Apollo he knew Leon Black. Through Black he knew Epstein, and gave the sex offender free advice. In March 2019 he wrote to Epstein that a draft motion was overwhelmingly persuasive and that he particularly liked the argument that the victims had lain in wait and sat on their rights for strategic advantage. He put the word victims in quotation marks.

This was the pivot arriving at its terminus. Karp chased corporate revenue to fund an identity, the revenue came with relationships, the relationships came with obligations, and one of the obligations was flattering a man’s lawyers about a filing that mocked girls he had abused. The chairman who kept a photograph of a reunited father and daughter on his desk wrote that email seven weeks before he sat for interviews about the firm’s conscience.

When the Justice Department released the files in January, the Deciding Group met without him over several days. Partners reported irate clients. They decided he had to go, and Barshay told him.

Two implications follow.

First, the betrayal narrative gets the causation backward. If the story is that a firm lost its nerve, the remedy is nerve. If the story is that a firm’s electorate changed and the new electorate had different preferences, then nerve was never available to be lost, and the decisive moment was 2016, when a compensation package purchased something nobody at the table priced. Ask what Paul Weiss thought it was buying when it paid Barshay more than its veterans. It was buying M&A market share. It was also buying a vote, and then a bloc, and then the firm.

Second, a reputation is capital that a partnership can spend for decades without noticing it has stopped funding the reserve. Every year the firm consumed some of what Rifkind and Liman built, and every year it converted the consumption into recruits and rankings, and the conversion was profitable, so nobody asked what would happen when the reserve was tested. Rifkind’s granddaughters, both lawyers, wrote that taking action to stay off an enemies list does not advance the rule of law. They were writing about an inheritance their grandfather funded and the firm drew down.

The Times reports that after the deal, Paul Weiss provided no examples of work opposing the administration.

That is the residual, allocated.

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Nobody in the Room Was Gullible

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

At the end of the annual equity, diversity and belonging lecture at Oxford’s Department of Education, on October 30, 2025, Jason Arday said something self-deprecating. He said his papers do not change anybody’s life. His actions do. He had said a version of it several times that evening, and he says it in most of his talks.

The chair then closed the event by thanking him and adding that she would like to say she believes his research is really changing people’s lives, one hundred percent.

He was performing modesty, which is the required move for the guest. She was rejecting the modesty, which is the required move for the host. If she had accepted his account of his own work, the evening would have ended with a senior academic agreeing that a Cambridge professor’s research is worthless, and the wine reception would have been strange.

That thirty seconds is the whole subject of this essay, and it is funnier than anything I could invent.

I used AI today to speed through the transcripts of twelve Youtube recordings of Arday between 2020 and 2025, hosted by Oxford colleges, Cambridge departments, a national broadcaster, learned societies, a physics faculty, a research council programme, an academic publisher and two podcasts. In none of them does any host ask a checkable question about a factual claim.

On October 17, 2022, at a Black History Month event hosted by the University of Bath’s culture and inclusion team and chaired by a vice-president who is also a UNESCO chair, Arday said he had been part of a programme called Seven Up, and described its format: they follow you over the duration of your life, at seven, fourteen, twenty-one. He said he was pulled out at fourteen. He was born in 1985. The series began following its subjects in 1964. It is among the most famous documentaries in British television history and its participants are named on a Wikipedia page.

The check takes eight seconds. Nobody ran it. Not that day, and not in the years the recording sat online.

Consider what else was said in those rooms.

At an EDI Caucus seminar in September 2023, chaired by Arday, Professor Kate Sang argued that the central weakness of equality and diversity research is that lived experience gets substituted for method. There is a tendency in this work, she said, for non-evidence-based practices to happen, and for people to assume that being affected by something means they know everything about it. She wanted the field recognised as expertise underpinned by robust theory and real empirical work. She then named Athena SWAN as an example of people doing the work without the expertise, noted it had not moved gender representation in the sciences, and observed that a number of white men who chaired Athena SWAN panels had progressed to professorships off the back of it.

That is as sharp a critique of a field as you will find anywhere, delivered inside the field, on the record, by one of its senior figures. Arday agreed with it and extended it to race and class.

Or take Harshad Keval, interviewed by Arday for Sage in April 2025, whose book argues that universities are narcissistic structures requiring the constant reproduction of an idealised image bounced back at them: facades that make an institution look liberal and equality-based while excluding anyone who fails to reflect back what the system needs.

Or take Arday, who in April 2020 said that academia is people telling people how good they are, matched by people telling them how good they are, so that nobody ever engages in any honesty.

These are not credulous people. Their critical faculties are in excellent working order. Sang can spot an unearned expertise claim at fifty yards. Keval can describe institutional self-flattery in clinical detail. Arday can describe the validation loop he is standing inside.

The faculty was operational. It was pointed at everything in the room except the man at the front.

So the question is not why they were fooled. It is what determines where scrutiny gets spent.

David Pinsof, David Sears and Martie Haselton set out the account in their Alliance Theory paper, and the line that matters is this: motivated reasoning is less a cognitive shortcoming than an signal of loyalty. If you do not trust your friends’ side of the story, they may not consider you a true friend. If you do not trust your fellow partisans’ account, they may not count you a true ally.

The failure to check was not a lapse in the operation of the room. It was one of the room’s functions.

Checking is cheap. Believing is what costs. A vice-president who googles her guest’s claims during a Black History Month event has produced nothing of value to anybody. A vice-president who introduces him as truly inspiring, calls his journey remarkable, thanks him for his honesty and courage, and circulates the recording to students has spent something and signalled something, and everyone present can see it.

The eight-second check was not skipped because it was hard. It was skipped because running it cost.

Pinsof and colleagues name three propagandistic biases that people apply to allies.

The attributional bias holds that we assign our allies’ advantages to internal causes and their disadvantages to external ones. Watch it operate. Arday’s achievements are attributed to will, determination, refusal to accept limits, an indomitable will. His obstacles are attributed to structural racism, institutional whiteness, a system built to exclude. Nobody in eleven recordings suggests that any part of his rise involved luck, though he says it himself on Channel 4, or that any part of any difficulty involved him.

Now run the same bias on a rival and you get the mirror. When Nathan Cofnas produced textual comparisons, the response was not to examine the comparisons but to attribute them: a race realist, a man with motives, part of a playbook. His finding was assigned to an external cause, which is his bad character, and Arday’s career was assigned to an internal one, which is his merit. Same operation, opposite signs, one coalition.

Pinsof lists the components of the perpetrator bias and the list reads like a summary of the defence mounted in 2026. People rationalise their allies’ transgressions by downplaying personal responsibility, emphasising mitigating circumstances, embellishing good intentions and minimising the severity of harm.

The Liverpool John Moores panel of March 2026 found that the citation problems amounted to honest and reasonable error, that the overlap fell within the accepted standards of the time, and that the supervisory team had been depleted. That is responsibility downplayed, circumstances mitigated, and harm minimised, in a single document. Arday told the Times he was accountable for his mistakes and that he had not murdered anybody, which is good intentions embellished and harm minimised in one sentence. Thirteen thousand people signed a letter saying the allegations were entirely false, which upgrades a finding of excusable error into a finding of no error at all.

I am on the other side of Arday’s coalition. I am a tribalist, a nationalist and a traditionalist, and I have disliked the crowd in these videos for years, and the theory I have just used to explain them applies to me.

I do not follow anybody on social media who consistently causes me pain, however much merit they have. When I engage with the other side’s arguments, I do it deliberately, for a limited period, with the psychic armour strapped on, and then I stop. My capacity to consider things fairly is finite, degrades under distress, and has to be rationed like any other scarce good.

The difference between me and the room at Oxford is smaller than I would like. They spent their scrutiny where it was cheap and withheld it where it hurt. So do I.

Pinsof’s paper is symmetrical on purpose. Both sides claim to be motivated by honesty, altruism and love, and both sides claim their opponents are motivated by selfishness, dishonesty and hate, and since both cannot be right, the parsimonious reading is that both are propaganda.

The reason my side noticed the Seven Up claim and Rajani Naidoo did not is not that we are smarter than a UNESCO chair. It is that we are outside the coalition, and outsiders audit while insiders vouch.

What is at stake here is certification.

Watch what these events are for. A UNESCO chair and a vice-president confer standing. An Oxford college confers standing. Channel 4 confers standing. The British Sociological Association confers standing. A Sage book series and a Princeton imprint confer standing. And certified claims then travel: the Leading Routes work that Arday cites and contributed to went to the research councils and produced an eight-million-pound funding competition. Parliamentary records show a minister meeting academics about the harassment of Black academics on September 15, 2025. He advised parliamentarians for years. He sat, as he put it, in committee room 14 of the House of Commons explaining why research should influence policy.

That is the coercive power, and runs through certification. A claim becomes policy-eligible when institutions with standing have vouched for it, and vouching is a coalitional act performed by people with coalitional interests, using a scrutiny budget allocated coalitionally.

This is why the Cofnas material could not travel until the Guardian ran it, and why the Guardian could only run it once Paula Zwozdiak-Myers gave the story a wronged party the register was permitted to pity. The finding had been available for a year. It could not be certified.

A coalition holds the certifying institutions. Certification is the route from claim to policy. People outside the coalition have no route.

Arday’s coalition accepted his story because it was convenient, and they will discard him when that option becomes more convenient.

Now the comedy.

The Oxford EDI Caucus seminar of September 2023 opens with the convener acknowledging the lack of racial diversity on the panel and noting that other forms of diversity are present but not immediately visible. It is an accessibility seminar. Two minutes later she explains that they were unable to secure a BSL interpreter.

At Kellogg College in October 2021, Shreya Atrey introduces Arday by announcing that she is not going to introduce him, then introduces him, then hands to Yasmin Khan who introduces him again. Somewhere in there she observes that change is not a word which is very popular in Oxford, but it is nice to say it sometimes.

On the Next Pivot Point podcast in September 2025, after Arday has described the exhaustion of doing this work, the host says she feels she needs to send him a Groupon for a spa day.

At Oxford Physics in March 2021, a question comes in reading, in its entirety, “what about physics?” The host, Alex Ramadan, says she is not entirely sure what is being asked but is going to interpret it how she wants to interpret it, delivers a short speech about her department, and concludes that even though the questioner asked a question she does not understand, she thinks she has answered it. This is the most honest thing anyone says in eleven recordings.

The Neurodivergent Show, in March 2023, is where it stops being funny. The host, a mother of autistic children, plays a clip of Arday’s TEDx talk, weeps, says “there is hope” eight times in ninety seconds, and then, describing his childhood, says: we knew what we were dealing with, so we got him into therapy, we got him into everything. She has never met him. She learned about him from a friend who sent a video on Instagram. Within a month of the Cambridge announcement, a life story had travelled from a keynote to a broadcast to a mother deciding what to do about her own child, through four hops, with no verification point anywhere along the chain, and she is now telling parents who do not follow her advice that she is sorry for the future of their kids.

That is what the certification chain looks like at the far end, and it is why the eight-second check was not a trivial thing to skip.

The experts worth following on any contested question are the ones with low coalitional exposure, and they are rare in every camp and unpopular in all of them. David Sanders at Purdue, who read a dossier and reported what was in it. Kate Sang, telling a room full of allies that their field substitutes lived experience for method. John Preston at Essex, saying the evidence lines up into a case to answer. Benjamin Ryan, going through the Internet Archive on his own time. James Richards, who responded to his son’s autism diagnosis by finding the literature under-evidenced and going and doing a postgraduate certificate and publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, which is the road not taken in this entire story.

Notes

The certification chain

The Leading Routes research on Black British students and research council funding, and the figure of roughly thirty studentships out of thirty thousand going to Black Caribbean students, is described by Arday at roughly 4:45 in the Oxford Physics talk, where he credits Paulette Williams, Chantelle Lewis and Sukhi Bath and says he was part of the work. The Telegraph, July 25, 2026, reports the parliamentary record of Jacqui Smith meeting academics about the harassment of Black academics on September 15, 2025: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/cambridge-diversity-poster-boy-plagiarism-134658961.html

The 2026 findings

The March 2026 panel conclusions on honest and reasonable error, the accepted standards of the time, and the depleted supervisory team are reported by Fiona Hamilton and Emma Yeomans, The Times, July 31, 2026: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-university-cambridge-plagiarism-kwfk6sm6c The solidarity letter stating that the allegations were entirely false: https://goodlawproject.org/petition/stand-in-solidarity-with-jason-arday/ The sixty-three page dossier and David Sanders’s independent review: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/

The Youtube videos

In order of recording: “Decolonising HE: Doing the ‘work’ as a person of colour,” MA Education Consultancy, April 2020. “Challenges & Changes: Dr Jason Arday,” Department of Physics, University of Oxford, March 2021. “BAME Awarding Gap Keynote Lecture,” UCL Outreach, March 2021. “Black History Month Lecture: Academia is a Crossfire Hurricane,” Kellogg College, Oxford, October 2021. “Inspiration and Courage: Jason Arday in Conversation with Rajani Naidoo,” University of Bath Race Equality Taskforce. “Jason Arday – Things Can Only Get Better,” Society for Experimental Biology, recorded December 2022. “Ep 14 – The Life of Dr. Jason Arday,” The Neurodivergent Show, March 3, 2023. “EDICa Seminar: In Conversation With Workstream Leads,” EDI Caucus, recorded September 19, 2023. “Social Science for Social Justice?,” Surviving Society, February 2024. “Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and the University,” Sage, April 2025. “Pushing back Against the Zeitgeist,” Next Pivot Point, September 2025. “EDB Lecture: This Is A Low,” Department of Education, University of Oxford, October 30, 2025. The Channel 4 interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, September 2023, is a twelfth.

Posted in Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas | Comments Off on Nobody in the Room Was Gullible

To The Values

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

At six Efraín Sosa watched the coat check fill and learned the hierarchy from the sleeves. The associates and the fourth-year laterals wore the tuxedos they had bought for a wedding, shoulders a little wide, the satin already going gray at the lapel edge. The partners wore tuxedos cut for them, and the older partners wore ones cut for them a long time ago, which fit better than anything. One man handed over a topcoat with a lining the color of a good orange and did not take a ticket. Efraín noted him. Men who do not take tickets know somebody will find the coat.

Danny Wexler came at ten past six, and stood under the whale alone for a minute with his hands in his pockets.

His CFO had asked him twice if he wanted the Hall of Human Origins, which came in eleven thousand cheaper.

“Under the monkeys,” Wexler had said. “You want the new partner class to stand up and talk about what this firm means to them under the monkeys.”

“They’re hominids.”

“Get me the whale.”

He had run Kessler, Adair & Roth for nine years. In that time revenue had doubled, the London office had gone from twelve lawyers to sixty, and the firm’s pro bono hours had crossed forty thousand a year. The dinner was his renovation. He added the remarks. Each new partner stood at the microphone for three minutes and said what the firm’s values meant to him.

The firm had been founded in 1934 by two men who could not get hired anywhere else in the city. It had hired its first Black associate in 1949 and made her a partner in 1961. It had put four lawyers on the Merrick case for six years without a dollar in fees and had gotten nine men off a Louisiana road gang. Wexler kept a photograph of the Merrick lawyers on the credenza behind his desk, and when recruits came in he let them find it.

Arnie Feld, seventy-eight, of counsel, holder of the firm’s pro bono portfolio since Nixon, held court by the walrus diorama with a club soda.

“They put us in front of the walruses,” he said.

“You want the giant squid?” said Nell Ostrow. She was thirty-four, six months into partnership, and had not eaten since ten in the morning.

“I want the room we had at the Yale Club,” Feld said. “Two hundred grand for a whale. You know what two hundred grand is? That’s the Dominguez appeal. That’s a year of the immigration clinic and a paralegal.”

Gordon Pike came in at twenty to seven with his wife on his arm and made the room turn without saying anything. He had arrived at the firm in April from Callender & Frame with a book of business north of ninety million dollars, and Wexler had paid him more than any partner in the building, a figure eleven people knew and a hundred and forty guessed at. Pike was fifty-two, thick through the chest, with a haircut that cost what a case of the Barolo cost. He wore a thin gold watch on a brown strap with a dinner suit, which two men in that room clocked as wrong and four clocked as a flex.

“There he is,” Wexler said, and the two of them shook hands with the left hand on the elbow.

Rina Pike stood a half step back and did the arithmetic. Her husband’s table was table two. Table one held the chairman, the head of corporate, the head of litigation, and their spouses. Table two held Pike, the co-head of private equity, the CFO, and a man from the Deciding Group whose name she had learned in the car. Six months in and he was at two. Gordon had told her in the taxi that two was fine. He had said it twice.

Dinner went out at 7:20. Halibut or short rib, chosen in advance, the cards at each place marked with a small blue dot or a small red one, which Efraín had learned years ago to keep small because guests do not like to be sorted.

The remarks began with the salad plates cleared.

There were five new partners. The first was a tax lawyer from the Washington office who spoke for two minutes about his father, a postal inspector, and got a warm hand. The second was a bankruptcy partner who thanked eleven people by name and ran four minutes. The third was Nell Ostrow.

She had written it out on a card and then put the card in her clutch and left it there.

“In 1961 this firm wrote down what it was for,” she said. “Six paragraphs. My grandfather had it taped inside a cabinet in his kitchen in Providence because his lawyer gave it to him when he came out of the hospital and couldn’t pay. He never worked here. He never met anybody who worked here. He kept it because somebody at this firm sued a landlord for him in 1974 and nobody ever sent him a bill.”

She stopped and drank some water and the room let her.

“I’ve had a bad year,” she said. “I sat in a hallway in Baton Rouge in February with a woman whose son died in a county lockup and I told her what we could do and what we couldn’t, and I want to tell you the reason I could sit there is that eight hundred people in this room bill nine hundred dollars an hour to private equity funds. That’s the deal. I’m not embarrassed by it. I’d rather say it out loud than have it be the thing we don’t say.”

Feld put his club soda down.

“So thank you for the deal,” she said. “Please don’t change it.”

The applause went ninety seconds and Wexler stood for it, which he had not done for the first two, and half the room stood because he did. Rina Pike watched her husband put his palms together and separate them fourteen times and then reach for his glass.

The fourth new partner spoke for a minute and forty and knew enough to keep it short.

Then Wexler took the microphone and said that although Gordon was not technically in the new partner class, he had joined the firm this year, and it was a tradition, and Gordon had graciously agreed.

Pike buttoned his jacket on the way up. He did not carry anything.

“Values,” he said. “Danny asked me to talk about values. I’ve been here seven months, so what do I know.”

Laughs.

“I’ll tell you what I know. I spent twenty-one years at a firm across the street. Great firm. Beautiful lobby.” He let a beat go. “In 2019 a client of mine, a public company, wanted to fight the government on a designation that would have taken forty percent off their market cap. It was a righteous case. We had the law. I went to the management committee and I got a forty minute lecture about relationships. About how you don’t put a firm in an adversarial position. About the long view.” He shook his head slow. “The long view. Twenty-one years of the long view. I watched men who couldn’t try a parking ticket sit around a table and explain courage to me.”

Two hundred and sixty people got quiet in a way that had texture to it. Efraín, standing at the service door with his folder under his arm, had heard rooms go quiet at weddings and knew the difference between a room holding its breath and a room deciding something.

“So when Danny called me,” Pike said, “I asked him one question. I said, Danny, when it gets hard, what does your firm do.”

He put a hand out toward the room.

“You people took the Merrick case for six years for nothing. That’s not a brochure. That’s the answer to my question. I came here because this firm has values.” He raised his glass and turned a quarter, taking in the hall, the uplights, the cables, the fiberglass belly hanging forty feet over the tables. “The other place had a museum.”

The laugh came from table two and table nine and about a third of the corporate side, and it was a real laugh, and it went four seconds and then noticed it was alone and quit.

Pike drank. “To Kessler Adair,” he said. “To the values.”

“To the values,” said the room.

Wexler was on his feet with his hands going before Pike had cleared the second step, and he had the microphone back and was saying something about Gordon’s competitive fire and about how the firm had been lucky twice this year, once with the new partner class and once with the whale, which got the room laughing, which was the point of saying it.

At the coat check the huddles formed by practice group.

“He knifed them,” said a litigation partner named Roth-Kaplan. “Under a whale. At a values dinner.”

“He knifed them at a values dinner,” her husband said. “Where else are you going to do it.”

“His whole thing was that they wouldn’t fight the government. Do you understand what he’s telling us? He’s telling us he lost that fight over there and he’s not going to lose it here.”

In the car Rina Pike watched her husband work his phone with his thumb.

“You went eleven minutes,” she said. “The girl went four.”

“She was good,” Pike said. “She’s going to leave.”

“Why.”

“Because she meant it.” He put the phone face down on his thigh and looked out at the park going by. “You saw who laughed.”

“I saw.”

“That’s the firm,” he said. “The rest is the plaque.”

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The Man Who Diagnosed the Machine

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

In April 2020, two weeks into the first lockdown, an assistant professor at Durham sat on a video call with two other academics of colour and described the business he worked in.

He said that when you rise a little, relationships turn transactional, and people deal with you because they want something. He said the biggest disappointment of his career was not any racism he had encountered but the gap between what prominent academics said about equality and what they did. He said academia had become a gig economy, and that you learn very quickly how powerful it is to be able to say things in a particular way, and how large the reputational and fiscal rewards are for saying them well. He said race was big business across every institution in society and that a lot of people were profiting from that plight. He said there comes a point where you cannot keep profiting from something if nothing is changing, and that when it comes you vacate the space.

He said anyone can occupy a platform and be antagonistic, and tell white people what they need to do, and that the people doing it should get their own house in order first. He said it is easy to say things and hard to put them into action. He said academia is people telling people how good they are, matched by people telling them how good they are, so that nobody ever engages in honesty. He said many people in the sector are bereft of morals and ethics. He said there is a fine line between doing the best you can and exploiting the narrative.

And he said he would be out by forty. His daughter would turn eighteen in five years, and that would be the time to step aside for a generation with new energy, because if you stay too long you either accept the system or it beats you down.

Jason Arday turned forty in 2025. That year he was a professor at Cambridge with a memoir contract, a Princeton book, a Sage book series, and a speaking schedule that took him from Oxford colleges to a funeral directors’ convention in New Orleans.

The obvious way to read this is as hypocrisy, and that bores me.

I want to argue instead that the people best positioned to describe a machine are the people inside it. Describing it well is one of the things the machine rewards. And a critique delivered from a stage, on a fee, to applause, is not a defence against the system being criticised. It is an output of that system.

Start with how good the diagnosis is.

Set aside who said it and read the 2020 passage as a description of a labour market. It identifies the product, which is the capacity to say things in a particular way. It identifies the currency, which is reputational and fiscal simultaneously. It notes that the currency is paid for performance rather than for outcome, which is why nothing changes and the payments continue. It observes that the validation loop is closed, since everyone in the room is being told they are excellent by people who are also being told they are excellent. It predicts the entry of people who are in it for the returns. And it names the moral hazard, which is that a man can keep drawing income from a problem he is not solving.

That is a better account of the political economy of academic diversity work than most of what has been published on the subject, including by its critics, who tend to reach for ideology when the answer is payment structures. It was given away in a podcast with a few hundred views.

He kept saying it. In December 2022 at Cambridge he told a room of biologists that decolonising had been franchised and packaged, that he had yet to meet anyone who could define it, that changing a reading list was hollow, that the interventions harmed the people delivering them, and that the victory belongs to the university while the failure belongs to them. In October 2025 at Oxford he described the self-cannibalisation and the vanity of academia, the jostling to be front and centre, and the fantasy of validation: wanting someone to say the paper is amazing, wanting the highest h-index. He said this is not everything.

So the diagnosis was a fixed position, held for five years, restated in every register.

Consider a keynote about the vanity of academia. That is a booking. It carries a fee or an honorarium. It generates an invitation to the next one. It ends with applause and a wine reception and a queue of people wanting a word. It produces a recording that a university puts on its channel with the speaker’s name and title. It is, in every measurable respect, an instance of the thing being described.

This is a general property of critique inside institutions. The person who stands up and says that this industry rewards people who say things well is being rewarded for saying that well. There is no position outside from which to deliver the observation. The sociology of knowledge has known this since Mannheim and has never done much with it, and the reason is that acknowledging it costs the critic his own standing.

A critique of a system, delivered from inside, functions as a demonstration of distance from that system. Everyone else is doing the shallow thing; I can see the deeper problem; therefore I am not one of them. The audience accepts it because the alternative is discourteous. And the speaker accepts it because he is the one person in the room who cannot check it.

The performance of exemption is how you stay exempt.

A hypocrite knows. Whatever else these eleven recordings show, they do not show a man who thought the critique applied to him. They show a man who kept sharpening it, deploying it against senior figures, and treating himself as the person who had noticed.

He said in 2020 that he wondered daily whether he would have entered this line of work knowing what he knew, and that he definitely would not have. He said in October 2025 that his belief in his own words was down to one per cent. Both statements are the statements of a man who thinks he is the exception rather than the specimen.

Does the accuracy of the diagnosis tell us anything about the diagnostician?

I think it does.

There is a version of this story in which the critique is the last honest thing about him, a residue of the PE teacher who came into academia in 2012 and was appalled. On that reading, the man in 2020 saw clearly and was later swallowed, and the 2025 lecture is the sound of somebody who knows exactly what has happened and cannot say it.

There is another version in which the critique is a competitive move. Naming the vanity of academia is a strong position to hold in a field where sincerity is the scarce good. Announcing that others profit from the plight establishes that you do not. Saying you have no online presence, that you never talk about your research, that your papers change nobody’s life and your actions do, that you would leave at forty, that you are not an expert and know nothing: each of these is a claim on the only status that field has left to award, which is the status of the person who is not in it for the status.

Both readings produce a man who says the true thing for five years and is shaped by the incentives anyway.

That is the finding. The critique was inert. It changed nothing about his trajectory, restrained nothing, and cost him nothing, because it was itself a form of participation. He named the machine from a stage the machine had built for him.

We tend to treat self-awareness as a partial defence. A man who can describe the corrupting pressures on him seems less likely to be corrupted by them, and we grant him credit accordingly. Every institution does this. Journalists trust the reporter who talks about the limits of reporting. Universities promote the academic who can name the perverse incentives of the REF. Audiences forgive the speaker who opens by saying he distrusts speakers.

The credit is unearned. Insight into a system is evidence about the quality of somebody’s attention, and nothing else. It says he watched carefully. It does not say he acted differently, because acting differently costs something and noticing costs nothing, and the two capacities are unrelated.

The test is never what a man says about the pressures on him. It is what he did when a pressure arrived.

By that standard, the record here is checkable and the answer is available. In 2020 he said there comes a point where you cannot keep profiting from something that is not changing, and that you vacate the space. In 2020 he said he would go at forty and hand the charge on. The forty came. The Cambridge chair came, and the memoir, and the honorary degrees, and the plenaries, and the speaking agency, and the book series.

He did not vacate.

The Jason Arday videos I surveyed today show that the man produced, five years early, an accurate account of a set of incentives, named the exact point at which a decent person would leave, and then arrived at that point and did the ordinary thing.

In February 2024 he sat on a podcast and said that when Black scholars produce work, the response is to police and trivialise it as not empirical, not rigorous, theoretically flawed. In September 2025, on an American podcast, he said what was happening to Black academics who put their heads above the parapet was almost like a modern-day lynching. In April 2026 at the British Sociological Association he delivered a plenary on the playbook used to bring down Black academics through citation errors and textual overlaps.

Each of those is a general claim about a real phenomenon. Each was made by a man about whom, by September 2025, a specific dossier existed.

So the same analytic gift that produced the 2020 diagnosis produced the frame that would later absorb his own case. He could see the machine from inside. He could see, ahead of almost everyone, what the coming attack on race scholarship would look like and how it would be conducted. And that clarity, applied to his own situation, did not produce caution. It produced a ready-made interpretation waiting for the facts to arrive.

The capacity to describe a system is a capacity to describe. It arms nothing. It restrains nothing. Held long enough by a man under pressure, it becomes a way of not looking, because a man who has spent five years explaining how institutions deceive themselves has a great many places to put a difficult fact.

He was right about the machine. He was standing in it the whole time, at a lectern, being paid.

Notes

Every quotation and paraphrase comes from a recording available in full on Youtube.

The 2020 diagnosis

“Decolonising HE: Doing the ‘work’ as a person of colour,” MA Education Consultancy, published April 3, 2020, with Jo Shah, Zainab Khan and Meena Kumari-Wolfenden. The transactional relationships, the disconnect between what senior academics say and do, the gig economy, race as big business, the fine line between doing your best and exploiting the narrative, the observation that academia is people telling people how good they are, and the plan to leave at forty when his daughter turned eighteen, all fall between roughly 22:00 and 29:00 and again between 1:05:51 and 1:13:10. The same recording contains the passage in which he says he has profited from the labour of women of colour and was complicit in standing by, which is the most creditable thing he says in any of these recordings and belongs in any fair account.

The critique restated

“Jason Arday – Things Can Only Get Better,” Society for Experimental Biology, published January 9, 2023, recorded at Cambridge in December 2022. Decolonising as a franchised term, the failure of anyone to define it, the harm to those delivering the interventions, and the line about the victory belonging to the university and the failure belonging to them.

“EDB Lecture: This Is A Low: Advice For Difficult Times,” Department of Education, University of Oxford, October 30, 2025. Self-cannibalisation, the vanity of academia, and the passage on validation and the h-index, from roughly 22:08 to 27:30. The same lecture contains the closing remark that the one thing that would kill him is somebody saying that what he says and what he does are two different things.

The frame, before the event

“S1/E1 Delayna Spencer, Meredith Clark & Jason Arday: Social Science for Social Justice?“, Surviving Society, February 26, 2024, at roughly 31:36, on the policing and trivialisation of Black scholars’ work as not empirical, not rigorous, theoretically flawed.

“Pushing back Against the Zeitgeist,” Next Pivot Point, September 22, 2025, at roughly 16:42, on the modern-day lynching of academics who are publicly discredited.

The British Sociological Association plenary of April 2026, “Wanted Dead or Alive: The Playbook,” is reported by Lanre Bakare, The Guardian, August 1, 2026.

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The Module

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

FICTION:

March 2, 2023

The canteen at the Rugeley site had four tables, three microwaves and a television bracketed to the wall that nobody could reach to change.

Dean Coyle was fifty-one and had been on the counterbalance eleven years. He came in at ten past six with his flask.

“Have you seen this,” Jodie said. She was twenty-four, agency, six months in, phone flat on the table so three people could watch. “This professor.”

The clip ran. Then it ran again, because Jodie had it saved.

“Youngest Black professor at Cambridge,” Jodie said. “Autistic. Didn’t speak till he was eleven. Couldn’t read till he was eighteen.”

“Couldn’t read till eighteen.”

“That’s what it says.”

Dean put his flask down.

“Didn’t talk till he was eleven.”

“Yeah.”

“My sister’s lad didn’t talk till he was eleven. He’s twenty-two now. He’s got about forty words and he lives at home and my sister does everything for him. Everything. She’s fifty-four and she’s washing a grown man.”

“It’s a different kind, though, isn’t it,” Jodie said. “Autism. It’s a spectrum.”

“It’s a spectrum,” Dean said. “I’ve heard.”

Errol Baptiste came over with tea. He was fifty-eight, thirty-one years on site, and he ran the wrapper because nobody else could get it to behave.

“What’s the excitement.”

“Professor at Cambridge,” said Jodie. “Look.”

Errol watched about twenty seconds of it.

“Thirty-seven,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“My cousin’s been at Wolverhampton nineteen years. Nineteen. She’s a senior lecturer. She’s got two books out and she marks till one in the morning.” He drank his tea. “Thirty-seven and a chair at Cambridge.”

“Well, he’s had it hard, hasn’t he,” Jodie said.

“We’ve all had it hard,” Errol said.

Karen Vosper came in at half six with the shift sheet. She was forty-seven and a team leader and she had done more courses than anyone in the building.

“What are we watching.”

“That professor.”

Karen looked at the phone for four seconds.

“Right,” she said. “Don’t say any of that upstairs.”

“Say any of what.”

“Any of it. Whatever any of you were about to say. Head office will have it on the intranet by Friday. When they do, you say inspiring.”

“Inspiring.”

“Inspiring’s good for about two years,” Karen said, and went to check the racking.

November 9, 2023

The module was called Neurodiversity and Belonging and it took forty minutes and had to be done by the end of the month.

They put four laptops in the training room and let people do it in pairs at the end of shift, which meant Dean did his with Karen sitting next to him with a coffee and her reading glasses on a chain.

“Question six,” Dean said. “A colleague makes a comment about a neurodivergent team member. Do you A, address it in the moment, B, report it through the appropriate channel, C, monitor the situation.”

“B.”

“It says here A is about creating an inclusive culture.”

“A is what they want you to feel. B is what they want you to do. Click B.”

He clicked B.

“This is a test.”

“It’s not a test. It’s a record.” Karen took her glasses off. “Dean. Listen. When something happens on this site, and it will, somebody in Milton Keynes pulls up who did the module and what they put. That’s what it’s for. It’s not for you. It’s for them.”

“Then why am I doing it.”

“So they’ve got a piece of paper with your name on it saying you were told.”

Dean sat back.

“Question eleven,” he said. “Which of the following is a limiting assumption about neurodivergent colleagues.”

“Read them.”

“A, assuming somebody can’t do a task. B, assuming somebody needs help. C, assuming somebody’s condition explains their behavior.”

“A.”

“They’re all the same thing.”

“They’re all the same thing and it’s A.”

He clicked A. It went green.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve done eleven of these,” Karen said. “It’s always the first one. The first one’s the one they wrote first and the other two are the ones they wrote after lunch.”

He finished at 7:52. The certificate came up with his name spelled Deane.

On the way to the car park he said, “That fella. The Cambridge one. He’s in it, isn’t he. There’s a bit about him.”

“There’s a bit about him.”

“So the module’s about him.”

“The module’s about the module,” Karen said.

Dean stood by his van. He had thought about it for eight months on and off, mostly at four in the morning, and he had not said it to anyone at work.

“I’ll tell you what gets me,” he said. “It’s not him. It’s that they want me to be amazed. They just want the clapping.”

“Right.”

“And if I say what I’ve just said, I’m the one with the problem.”

“Yes,” Karen said. “So don’t say it.”

June 14, 2024

The Coach and Horses had the election on and the sound down.

“You’re never,” said Errol.

“I am.”

“Reform.”

“Reform.”

“Dean.”

“Go on then. Tell me.”

Dean had four points and he had rehearsed them in the van.

“One. They told us about the vaccine and they were sure. Then they were sure about something else. They were never sorry, they were just sure about the next thing. Two. Every one of them has a story now. Every single one. You can’t get a job or a book or a spot on the telly unless you’ve got a story about how hard it was, and if your story’s just that you got up at five for thirty years, that’s not a story, that’s a shift pattern. Three. My mother waited fourteen months for a hip. Four.”

“Go on.”

“Four’s the one I can’t say at work.”

“Say it here.”

“They’ve got an answer for everything and none of the answers ever come true,” Dean said. “That’s all. They said the wages would go up. They said the town would come back. They said the college would be a university. Our Chelsea’s got eleven grand of debt and she works in Greggs. And when I say any of that I’m thick, and when they say it and it’s wrong they’re just early.”

Errol nodded for a while.

“And your professor.”

“He’s not my professor.”

“He’s the top of the pile of what you’re describing. That’s why you keep bringing him up.”

“I’ve brought him up twice in a year.”

“You’ve brought him up twice tonight.” Errol finished his pint. “I’ll say my bit. My mother came in fifty-nine. My father did the buses. I was told twice as good. Twice as good, don’t give them anything, don’t be late, don’t be loud. And I was twice as good and I’m on the wrapper. Now they want a lad with a story instead.”

He put the glass down. “So who was the twice as good for?”

March 2025

The letter said Ryan Coyle, twenty-two, warehouse operative, and it said a colleague had reported that on February 27 in the smoking area he had described a named academic as, and here the letter used the phrase in quotation marks, a retard who got the job for being Black.

Karen read it twice in her office with the door shut and Ryan sat there with his hood up.

“Take that down.”

He took it down.

“Did you say it.”

“I said something.”

“Did you say that.”

“Probably.”

“Right.” She put the letter face down. “Listen to me. I’m going to be in the room with you Thursday. There’s two ways this goes. You can tell them what you meant, which is going to take you eleven minutes and lose you your job. Or you can say four sentences and keep it.”

“What’s the four sentences.”

“You say: I said something stupid. You say: I’ve thought about it and I understand why it caused offense. You say: I’ve asked to redo the module. You say: I’m sorry, and I want to apologize to the person who heard it.”

“I’m not sorry.”

“I didn’t ask you that.”

Ryan looked at the desk.

“Is that not lying?”

“It’s a form,” Karen said. “You’re filling in a form with your mouth. They know it’s a form. The bloke from HR knows it’s a form and I know it’s a form and you’re the only one who’s going to stand there and want it to be real. That’s what costs people their jobs round here.”

“My dad wouldn’t do that.”

“Your dad’s fifty-two and he’s been on the same grade for eleven years,” Karen said. “How’s that working out.”

Ryan did the four sentences on the Thursday. He got a written warning and kept the job. Coming out he asked Karen how she knew all this and she said her sister had been a rep at Longbridge, and that was all she said, and Ryan told two people that afternoon that Karen was sound.

July 28, 2026

Jodie had left and come back on a permanent contract and had a lanyard now. She was the one who found it.

“Here,” she said. “That professor.”

“Which one.”

“The Cambridge one. Yours.”

“He’s not mine,” Dean said.

She read it off the phone in the canteen. Plagiarism allegations. A thesis. Papers with corrections on them. A magazine that had the story in 2025 and dropped it after a law firm wrote to them. Interview quotes that appeared to come out of somebody else’s study.

“The university says he’s been cleared,” Jodie said. “It’s in there. And they say there’s a campaign against him. And the bloke who put it out is a nutter about race.”

Karen came in with the sheet.

“Have you seen?”

“I’ve seen. There’s a note come round already.” She held her phone up without looking at it. “We’re not commenting on individual cases and our commitment to inclusion is unchanged.”

“That was quick.”

“They had it in the drawer,” Karen said. “They’ve had it in the drawer since Christmas.”

Dean drove home the long way. In 2023 he had been told what to say, and had said it, and had felt like a fool for saying it. The saying had changed again and he had been wrong both times, and nobody had ever written to him to tell him the rules had moved, and nobody ever would, because the letters only came when you got it wrong.

Somebody knew. Karen knew. Karen had known in March 2023 standing in the canteen with the shift sheet, and she had known what would be in the drawer at head office three years before they took it out.

He had asked her once how she did it. She said you watch what they do with the ones who get it wrong.

Posted in Jason Arday | Comments Off on The Module

The Weather

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

FICTION:

February 24, 2023

The Inclusive Futures Sector Summit took the whole ground floor of a hotel outside Birmingham, and Priya Raval got there at seven to check the lanyards.

Speakers got purple ribbons. Delegates got grey. Sponsors got a gold clip that snapped onto the ribbon, and one of the sponsors had complained the previous year that the gold clip looked cheap, so this year the clips were brass and cost eleven pounds each. Priya had signed off on the brass. She was thirty-three, EDI Lead at a post-92 in the Midlands, nineteen months left on a two-year contract, and she had learned that the safest place to spend money was on things senior people touched.

By ten the news had come through and the room had a subject.

“Watershed,” said the man from the sector body, holding a pastry he had no intention of eating.

“Youngest ever,” said someone else. “At Cambridge. At thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Didn’t speak until eleven.”

“Couldn’t read until eighteen.”

“At Cambridge.”

Priya counted. In forty minutes she heard the first name twenty-two times and the surname four. She had started counting at a conference in Manchester two years earlier, when she noticed that the ratio told you more than the content. First names went up as reputations went up. Then, later, they went the other way, and if you watched the ratio you knew before the room did.

Rufus Kenwright had a purple ribbon and a gold clip, which took some arranging. He ran a consultancy of four people and a website with a photograph of a boardroom he had never sat in.

“I’ve known Jason since Glasgow,” he said. “Before Glasgow, really.”

“You worked with him?”

“We were in the same conversations.”

Duncan Vane was director of communications at a Russell Group and did not wear his lanyard, which Priya considered the single most expensive status move available at the summit. He had spent the morning near the coffee and had said nothing anyone could quote.

“We’re looking at the whole strategy again,” Duncan said. “This changes the frame. It gives us something to build around.”

“Absolutely.”

“The question,” said a deputy vice-chancellor, “is how do we find our Jason.”

Nobody laughed. Priya wrote it in her notebook because she thought she might use it in a strategy document, and she did, in April, and it went down well.

Dame Helen Strachan came in at eleven for the plenary. She had run two universities, chaired a research council, and was seventy-four. She took a chair at the edge of the coffee area and a young man brought her a plate of fruit she had not asked for, which she accepted and did not touch.

“Enormous morning, Helen,” Duncan said.

“Mm.”

“Watershed, people are saying.”

“Cambridge has bought a biography,” Dame Helen said. “Biographies are cheap.”

There was a pause of about two seconds. Priya watched Duncan decide it was a joke, and then watched him laugh, and then watched two other people laugh a half beat after Duncan, because they had been waiting to see what it was.

“So true,” said Rufus. “Although I do think this one is real. I’ve known Jason for years.”

Priya wrote down what Dame Helen said. She did not repeat it to anyone.

At the plenary she sat in row four and clapped when the room clapped. Later, on the train, she tried to remember whether anyone at the summit had mentioned a single thing the man had written. She could not think of one. The applause had been for the story.

October 12, 2023

The meeting room at the publishing house was glass on three sides and named after a novelist who had died broke. Toby Fenwick-Hale sat with his back to the river and let Verity Mullan run the deck, because letting marketing run the deck was how you got marketing to fight for you in January.

“So the comp is Educated,” Verity said. “That’s our shelf. That’s our reader.”

“Big shelf.”

“Massive shelf. And we have something Westover doesn’t have, which is that he’s still in the institution. He’s in the chair.”

“Radio 4 love it,” said the publicity woman.

“Radio 4 will do a week.”

Toby was forty-six and had been an editorial director for five years. He had bought two memoirs that lost money and one that made a great deal, and the one that made a great deal had taught him that the story travels and the sentences do not. He had read the sample. The sentences sucked. They were also not the point.

“Any exposure?” he said.

The room looked at him with mild irritation, the way a room does when someone raises a thing that has an answer everyone already knows.

“There’s a retired academic with a website,” said the junior editor, who was the only person present who had done any reading. “He’s been going through the papers. There’s a correction coming on one of them, apparently. A journal thing.”

“A correction.”

“Added citations. That kind of correction.”

“Every subject has a man with a website,” Verity said.

“Every subject has a man with a website,” Toby agreed, and heard himself say it, and knew he had said it because it was the sentence that let the meeting continue. “We’ll do a full legal read at manuscript.”

“Obviously.”

“And we’ll want the mother in it,” Verity said. “The mother is the book.”

Toby said the number. The number was good. They had all been mildly enthusiastic and now they were committed, and by the time they were in the lift they had each acquired a private conviction that they had been the first to see it.

April 18, 2024

The conference dinner in Leeds was in a converted mill with bad acoustics, and Marcus Iyer had been seated at table nine.

He was thirty-eight. Teaching and scholarship contract, no research allocation, four modules, a book proposal in its third year of being nearly finished. He was the only Black man at table nine and one of six in the room, and he had done the count without meaning to, the way he had done it since he was nineteen.

The woman on his left was a professor at a Russell Group with a chair funded by a bank.

“Marcus,” she said, “you must have thoughts about the Cambridge business.”

The table turned.

He had about a second and a half. He knew the components. There was a correction notice on a paper. There were emails from an emeritus who had a website and had also written something against critical race theory, which meant the emeritus could be described as a critic rather than as a reader. There was a university statement of full support. There was nothing anyone at the table had read.

“I think the scrutiny is selective,” Marcus said. “Nobody goes through a white professor’s back catalog line by line.”

The table relaxed. He watched it happen. Shoulders went down around the whole nine of them, and the woman on his left said “quite,” and the man opposite said “that’s the thing, isn’t it, it’s the selectivity,” and someone refilled his glass, and the subject moved to the REF.

He had said a thing he believed. He had also said the thing they wanted.

In the corridor by the coats he found Sarah, who ran the doctoral program with him.

“Have you read the thesis?” he said.

“God, no.”

“Neither have I.”

They stood there.

“If it turns out to be what they say it is,” Marcus said, “then some of us are going to pay for it.”

Sarah looked at him.

“The campaign against him is disgraceful, obviously,” he added.

“Obviously,” she said, and they went back in.

September 30, 2025

Ellie Crowther ordered the lentils and no wine.

“So it’s dead,” she said.

“Killed or died?”

“Killed. Ours died. Theirs got killed.”

She was thirty-one and had two days a week at a sector publication and three days doing communications for a housing charity, which was how journalism worked now.

“The letter?”

“The letter.”

“Carter-Ruck?”

“Do you want me to say the name in a restaurant?”

Toby laughed.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “The editor doesn’t think about wrong. The editor thinks about a six-figure defense on a title with a sixteen-person newsroom and no insurance appetite. You put the dossier in front of him and he says, and I want you to hear the word he uses, he says: is this the story we want to resource?”

“Resource.”

“Resource.”

The lentils came. Toby had a pub date in his head, eleven months out.

“Is it true?”

“No question. Somebody serious went through it.”

“Somebody serious.”

“A sleuth in Indiana who does this for nothing.”

Toby put his fork down.

“So who publishes it?”

“Whoever has nothing to lose.”

July 28, 2026

The garden in Islington belonged to a woman who ran a foundation, and the party was for a report nobody had read, and it was the day after.

Priya had been at the new job eight weeks. Same grade. Different contract, still fixed term, sixteen months. She had come because Duncan had told her the right people would be there, and the right people were there, and they were doing something she had never seen a room do at speed.

They were sorting.

By the drinks table, three positions had already formed and were competing for the middle. Priya went along the terrace and listened to each one for a minute and a half.

“Look, I’ve had questions about that work for years,” said a man with a lanyard-shaped tan line. “Years. Ask anyone. I said it in 2023.”

“You said it in 2023.”

“I said something.”

At the second cluster a woman was signing the solidarity petition on her phone and turning the screen around so people could see the confirmation, and the confirmation was the point, and everyone said good, good, and one man took his phone out and then put it back in his pocket without unlocking it.

“He’s been cleared,” the woman said. “The university says he’s been cleared. Of the thesis and the papers. It’s in their statement.”

“There’s a memoir out in weeks.”

“There’s a memoir out in weeks and a philosopher on Substack who thinks Black people are less intelligent, and I know which of those two I’m standing next to.”

At the third cluster, near the fig tree, Duncan Vane said: “Our position has been governance-first throughout. We’ve always said the process has to be seen to be robust. That’s been our line since 2023.”

Priya had written his 2023 line. His 2023 line had used the word watershed.

Marcus was by the wall with a beer he had not drunk. She had met him twice. She went over because he had the expression of a man being asked things.

“Two in ten minutes,” he said. “One wants me to say witch hunt. One wants me to say standards. Same tone of voice. Same lean in.”

“What did you say?”

“To the first one I said the Cofnas sourcing is ugly. To the second one I said fabricated quotes would be serious. Both of them went away satisfied and neither of them was listening.”

“Did you say the same thing twice?”

Marcus thought about it.

“I said what was expected.”

Rufus Kenwright came past with a glass of something and stopped, because he had recognized Priya, and Priya braced.

“Awful business,” Rufus said.

“You knew him, didn’t you.”

“I met him once at a thing,” Rufus said. “Conference. Years ago. Barely spoke.”

He moved on. Priya stood there and felt the specific pleasure of a prediction landing, and then, a second later, felt something she did not enjoy, which was the recognition that she had not said a single sentence all evening that she would want printed under her name.

August 2, 2026

The bar of the hotel by the station had four people in it and a television with the sound off.

Dame Helen was down for a governance review and had an hour before her train. She was seventy-seven now and had given up the boards that required her to be pleasant.

“You were at the thing in Birmingham,” she said. “Twenty-three. The brass clips.”

“You remember the clips.”

“I remember everything about that morning. Nobody had read a word he wrote. Twelve hundred people and a standing ovation for a story.”

“You said something about biographies,” Priya said. “That they were cheaper than reform.”

“I did.”

“I wrote it down.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t say anything.”

Dame Helen turned her glass on the mat.

“No,” she said. “Of course you didn’t. You were on a two-year contract and I was on a pension and a damehood. I could say it because it cost me nothing. It cost me nothing and so it did nothing. If I’d cared about the outcome I’d have written it down and put my name on it and made it awkward for someone, and I didn’t, because I was seventy-four and I wanted to get to my train.”

The television showed a weather map.

“He may be innocent of all of it,” Dame Helen said. “What’s your interest?”

“What should I say,” Priya said. “When someone asks me. I get asked four times a week now.”

“You want me to tell you to say the true thing.”

“Yes.”

“Say the true thing.”

“I’ve got sixteen months on my contract.”

“I know,” Dame Helen said. “I can afford to be honest and it’s worth nothing because I’ve left the field, and you can’t afford it. Telling the truth doesn’t pay you. Don’t say things that don’t pay.”

She left for her train.

Priya sat for another twenty minutes and drafted an email to her director about the autumn program, and in the third paragraph she wrote a sentence about how the sector had spent three years selling stories it had not checked.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she took it out and put in a sentence about lessons for our assurance processes going forward, and sent it, and the director replied within the hour to say it was a really thoughtful note.

Posted in Jason Arday | Comments Off on The Weather