Folly of the DayA Cambridge Professor Resigns Amid a Plagiarism Inquiry Into the Doctorate That Got Him the Chair, Denies Deliberate Wrongdoing, and Announces That He Will Return 'Stronger and Wiser'
Set aside the merits, which are for Cambridge to determine and which the man himself disputes; the instructive part is the grammar of the exit. He does not leave, he pauses. He does not answer, he heals. He does not end, he returns — stronger and wiser, as though the allegation were a training injury and the scholarship a season. This is the characteristic dialect of the modern eminent, in which every reckoning is converted into a chapter and every chapter implies a sequel, and it is worth noticing what the conversion is for: a career that has become a narrative can survive facts that a career built on work cannot. The second thing worth noticing is that nobody at Cambridge ran the software. A stranger with a plagiarism checker did in an afternoon what the appointing institution had three years and a fellowship to do, which tells you the university was never examining a scholar. It was admiring a story about one, and it is now reviewing, at some length, how it came to be so easily pleased.
Source: The Guardian
The WireThe Director Was Also the Transport Manager, Which Meant the Man Driving on a Former Employee's Tachograph Card Was Supervised Entirely by Himself
The whole apparatus of transport regulation rests on a single unexamined assumption: that somewhere in every firm there is a person whose job is to watch the driving, and that this person is not the driver. Collapse the two roles into one man and the system does not fail loudly — it simply produces immaculate paperwork forever, because the auditor and the audited share a wallet. No man has ever failed his own inspection. What the commissioner actually removed was not a licence but a fiction, and the fiction is far more widely held than the fraud.
Source: GOV.UK / Office of the Traffic Commissioner
The WireThe Commission That Grades Judges on Following the Rules Was Found to Have Broken Its Own
There is a moment in the life of every oversight body when it stops experiencing the rules as something that binds it and begins experiencing them as something it administers — a substance it dispenses to others rather than a fluid it swims in. The transition is invisible from inside, which is why it is never announced and never resisted. A panel constituted solely to check whether judges met a standard could not itself be bothered to meet the one standard it had, and this is not hypocrisy so much as physics: authority over a rule is the fastest known solvent of obedience to it.
Source: Colorado Politics
The WireBanned From Driving and On Bail, He Allegedly Set Out With Thirteen People and the Alcohol in a Single Vehicle
A disqualification is a sentence that exists only in the mind of the disqualified, and this is its permanent weakness: it removes no keys, disables no engine, and can be observed only voluntarily. So it is quietly reclassified by its recipients from a prohibition into a price — a modest levy payable in the unlikely event of a second encounter with police. The tell here is the passengers. A man doing something furtive travels alone; a man who fills the car has ceased to regard the ban as a fact about the world at all.
Source: NT Independent
The WireThe University Could Not Fix What Ailed It, So It Bought a New Logo, Which Lasted Rather Less Than a Week
The rebrand is what an institution does when it has correctly identified that something is wrong with it and has no intention of finding out what. A logo can be commissioned, approved and unveiled inside a single academic year, which is roughly one-tenth the time required to improve a department and one-hundredth the time required to improve a culture; it is therefore chosen. The consolation is that a mark is a very small, very public object, and the internet inspects it with an attention nobody has ever given the strategic plan it was meant to distract from.
Source: San Antonio Express-News
Black-Robed EgomaniaHe Took the Oath in August, Was Required to Stop Practising Law by February, and Was Still Trying Cases as Defence Counsel in June
Note the shape of the excuse, because it is the most flattering one available: he broke the rule for the client. A bright-line rule exists precisely to be obeyed by men who are certain that this particular case is the exception, since every man who has ever broken one was so certain — that is the entire reason the line is bright rather than a matter for judgement. And a judge is the one occupation in which the faculty being hired is the ability to see that. He was elevated for his judgement, and the first use he made of it was to decide that a rule written specifically to survive his judgement did not.
Source: Judicial Conduct Dispatch (Cynthia Gray) / Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct
The Siren LedgerHe Was Retired. She Was 23, Named 'Bella', and Communicated Exclusively by Telegram. He Sent $222,000.
The step-by-step instructions are the detail that should be read twice. She never had to overcome his suspicion, because there was none to overcome; she only had to overcome his unfamiliarity with the interface, and so the great romance of his late life consisted largely of a stranger walking him through a wallet transfer. He had every fact required to know. What he did not have was any competing account of why a woman of twenty-three would want him, and a man will always prefer the flattering explanation to the arithmetic — which is the whole business model, and why it will still be running next year.
Source: Cryptopolitan
LazyTownThe Council Painted 'School Keep Clear' Outside a School Demolished Fifteen Years Earlier, and the 'S' Was Upside Down
Every stage of this worked perfectly. The order was valid, the paint was correct, the contractor attended, the invoice was raised — an entire chain of competent men executing a document, and not one of them raised his eyes from the road surface to the houses standing where the school had been for fifteen years. That is the lesson and it is not really about paint: the modern organisation is a machine for converting instructions into actions without anyone in the chain being responsible for looking. The upside-down 'S' is merely the machine signing its work.
Source: Stoke-on-Trent Live
The VillagesThe Dress Flew Private From Paris to London. Zendaya Flew Separately. The Press Called It a Logistical Feat.
Two hundred miles, and the garment travelled better than most of the audience will travel this year. But the celebrity is only half the exhibit; the other half is the trade press, which reported a jet chartered for a frock as a 'feat' — a word reserved, until quite recently, for engineering and endurance. That is the machinery worth watching. Fame does not generate its own importance; it is manufactured downstream by writers who have agreed to describe expenditure as achievement, and who will keep doing so, because the only thing more expensive than the jet would be admitting that nothing whatsoever was accomplished.
Source: WION
Campus WatchArizona State Now Offers a Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation, Four Years and a Tuition Bill for a Field Whose Defining Feature Is That It Requires Neither
The defence is probably true and entirely beside the point. Content creation is the one occupation in the developed world with no gatekeeper, no licence, no credential and no barrier whatsoever between a person and the practice of it — which is why a university can sell a degree in it. The degree is not a qualification to enter the field; it is a qualification to feel serious about having entered it, and that reassurance is the actual product, priced by the semester. A university that would not dream of offering a BA in Lottery Ticket Selection has grasped that the demand was never for the skill. It was for the diploma to hang beside the ring light.
Source: Inc.