In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There have been several recent TV documentaries on the November 13, 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students at an off-campus residence. I watched the one on Investigation Discovery, The Idaho College Murders . Quite a bit of the information in the program challenges the established narrative that these were four naive, unwitting victims. The first thing that struck both my wife and me was the luxury features of that off-campus residence. We'd both attended undergraduate colleges aimed at the upper middle class in the 1960s, and by comparison, our accommodations back in the day were Spartan. Not only did this place have a fully up-to-date kitchen, it had hardwood floors, fancy bathrooms, and walk-in closets. Everything had new paint. Bedrooms were up to the standard these kids could expect at home in upscale suburbs. I can only surmise that college costs are rising in part due to the increased standard of living students are led to expect. The second thing uncovered in...

The Jason Arday and Rahila Khan cases make me think of other potential literary hoaxes, for instance using AI. AI tells me that Lydia Davis, portrait above, is a highly respected author of micro fiction. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Can you write me a micro fiction piece as thoough Lydia Davis had written it?" The New Arrangement We agreed to divide the books evenly, but he insisted that the anthology of French poetry belonged to him because his grandfather had given it to him, even though he had never read a single line of it and I had translated three of the poems for a journal that paid me in copies. I let him keep it, of which I was quite proud, until I realized yesterday morning that without its spine on the third shelf, the remaining volumes of biography lean precariously to the left, forcing me to look at them slantwise every time I enter the room, which means he is still disrupting my posture months after moving out. I asked, "Can you explain how someone m...

The Jason Arday case brought to mind a somewhat similar kerfuffle from the 1980s, the Rahila Khan case. In 1986, Toby Forward, a white Church of England cleric from Hull, began submitting fiction under the pseudonym Rahila Khan, an Asian Muslim mother of two. Forward's side of the story is this : It came as quite a shock when I lost Rahila Khan. I’d known her for two years and we were very close. I told my agent that Rahila wanted to write a letter to the Guardian about a witless piece that they had done about her, but the agent was firm. ‘No. No more Rahila Khan. She’s finished.’ I was upset. We’d done a lot together in just two years. Rahila Khan and I wrote our first story for BBC Radio at the end of August 1985. We didn’t put my name on it. It was rejected, as not quite suitable, but with an encouraging letter saying that she wrote well and should try sending it to the women’s magazines. We were more pleased than disappointed, so we set to work to write another – after all...

There's something profoundly unserious about the UK lately, although I'm increasingly convinced this isn't new. According to The Guardian , Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and embellishment, has resigned after the university announced he was to face new investigations into his qualifications and career. Arday, who had been dogged by a growing series of questions over his academic work and credentials, issued a statement on Wednesday night, saying the “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love” . . . Simon & Schuster had been preparing to publish Arday’s memoir, entitled Great and Unfortunate Things, later this month. His resignation may pause or even halt its publication and planned publicity tours. The Simon & Schuster question may be just another of his prevarications. In a separate Guardian story , Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor accused of pl...

The case of Jason Arday , a professor at the UK Cambridge University, becomes more bizarre every day. If The Onion or Babylon Bee or another satirical publication wanted to spoof the absurdity of DEI -- the ideology of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" -- they couldn't have invented a character as unbelievable as Jason Arday. But Arday is very real: Born in 1985, in 2023 he became at 37 the youngest black man ever to hold a professorship at Cambridge University. Naturally, he had to overcome great adversity to do so -- indeed, superhumanly great adversity. Arday, the son of Ghanaian immigrants to London, is not only black; he's autistic and was nonverbal until the age of 11, according to glowing media profiles he's received. . . . In a 2021 blog post on the "International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination," the University of Bath presented Arday as claiming that he'd played both soccer and snooker (kind of like billiar...

The official version of the Ceuta crisis is that it's over, the migrants have mostly turned around and gone home, everything's back to normal. In reality, it's very difficult to check. Yesterday, I embedded an X post from the UK Spanish embassy that said as of this past Friday, July 31, they'd mostly gone back home. If this is the case, then the photos and videos of the migrants overrunning tbe streets should date almost entirely from Thursday, July 30. However, I embedded another X post yesterday from the UK's Tommy Robinson dated Saturday, August 1, apparently filmed the day before, that shows significant numbers of migrants still on the streets. The Nick Shirley video embeddded above, by far the most comprehensive report from the crisis, speaks of Juy 31 in the past tense, so I think it's reasonable to assume it was filmed over the weekend and released yesterday. Although it has some shots of migrant groups being escorted by Spanish guardsmen, there are ma...

Almost everyone who entered Ceuta yesterday has now returned to Morocco. It is not possible to travel from Ceuta or Melilla to mainland Spain without presenting identification at a police checkpoint. The integrity of the Schengen area is fully guaranteed. https://t.co/F2s3JWN4bF — Embassy of Spain UK (@EmbSpainUK) July 31, 2026 Anne Applebaum, a Yale legacy, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, board member of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative, editorial board member of The American Interest and the Journal of Democracy, member of the international board of directors of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and former Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), has delivered the establishment line on Ceuta at The Atlantic, a pet project of Laurene Powell Jobs, whose net worth is estimated...