One of Ronson’s subjects is Jonah Lehrer, a plagiarist and fabulist who, once exposed, suffered more serious consequences (firing, book pulped) than Arday did before his death. But Arday’s apologists endlessly assert no white man would ever be treated as Arday was.
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Arday's apparent suicide is tragic. He is far from the only casualty. Many others found themselves targets of witch hunts and vilification campaigns when they had not systematically perpetrated fraud, etc. Professor Mike Adams committed suicide after being targeted for his speech. Others, like Sarah below, considered the same.
@jonronson has a great book on the afterlives of those who've been chewed up and spit out by the culture wars -- folks who were obscure until they became the "main character," and who were then cast aside to sift through the wreckage of their lives while everyone else forgets they ever existed to begin with:
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Jonny Ball (@DespoticInroad) always worth reading 🫡
Democratic publics have no more reason to acquiesce to every new technology than they do to accept every new policy proposal or ideological fad that comes down the pike.
"Silicon Valley sometimes looks like a burned-over district for the 21st century, and the arms race between Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI recalls the feuds of splinter sects as much as corporate competition."
—@g_shullenberger
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There's a meme taking hold that because there is a local newspaper report of Arday completing the 30 marathon challenge, that claim is "proven" - without acknowledging that he elsewhere lied to journalists (pig's head) and lied about achievements (600 miles).
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“True crime can be described as rough porn for the clean girl, the conscientious and socially responsible woman who uses the suffering of others as a vehicle for her own gratification.”
@malinhassla on the dark pleasures of true crime:
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My latest for @chronicle is a longform essay on the #JasonArday# scandal. But it's mostly about the inhumanity of the culture wars and the debasement of institutions, told from the perspective of someone who has been cancelled, and whose story nearly ended the same way as his. 🧵
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Cute family pic from baby’s first Midsommar human sacrifice ritual:
We are 6 million (probably fewer) ethnic Swedes.
That’s 0.07% of the world’s population.
We are a minority, and we need to be protected.
I feel proud to have written something as unusual as a NSFW essay; on our true crime culture, Nikki Glaser’s Joe Rogan pornography confession, the BTK Killer and Freud’s ”death drive”: @compactmag
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The Lindsay Clancy trial has sent the online true crime world into a frenzy. For @compactmag, I wrote about true crime as a form of transgressive female entertainment—and asked an intentionally uncomfortable question:
Is true crime porn for clean girls?
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“True crime can be described as rough porn for the clean girl, the conscientious and socially responsible woman who uses the suffering of others as a vehicle for her own gratification.”
@malinhassla on the dark pleasures of true crime:
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Why the obsession with true crime among women?
It's pornography for the "clean girl," writes @malinhassla. You get the thrill, the body, and none of the consequences.
9 out of 10 of Britains’s bestselling paperback novels featured the murder of a woman
In true crime, violence largely committed by men and suffered disproportionately by women is repackaged as entertainment for a heavily female audience.
What explains this appeal? @malinhassla investigates:
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The classical theorists of capitalism did not believe growth was to be pursued at all costs. Indeed they were only willing to support capitalism insofar as it facilitated morally good lives alongside generating wealth.
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Because a news outlet I’ve never heard of found that a couple news outlets I’ve never heard of reported in 2010 that Jason Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days, now all of Bluesky believes he really did. None of them have realized that he could have just told those outlets he did at the time. All of this is based on his word. It is this very sort of credulity that allowed him to keep telling such stories for 16 years totally unchecked.
I already reported on those local news stories weeks ago anyway. They never proved anything, because Arday would’ve run all those marathons almost entirely solo. He had no tracking device and wasn’t running as a part of any official race.
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From papal encyclicals to end times prophecies to the Antichrist and more, our technological era is also increasingly theological in orientation.
I explore how this happened in @PostOpinions:
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