Steven Curtis

@stevencurtis.bsky.social

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National Teaching Fellow (2011) Diplomatic Studies | Public & Diaspora Diplomacy | Higher Education | Learning & Teaching in Politics and International Relations | Film and Music

Arday’s teaching responsibilities at Cambridge (from a hastily deleted webpage)

J. Arday (2018) 'Being Black, Male and Academic: Navigating the White Academy', in J. Arday and H. S. Mirza (eds), Dismantling Race in Higher Education, Palgrave Macmillan

“… with two regular-sized legs”

OpenAI's rubbish new donut-shaped idea to try to make some money

Edits to one section of the memoir, about Arday's freshman year at St. Mary's University, London, are particularly telling. In the January proof, an instructor tells Arday, then 20, that the faculty is "trying to determine if this is really your work." But the later draft softens the instructor's question to simply "if you are really capable of this."

The more recent proof of the book removes a disclaimer on its opening page that "some dialogue has been re-created."

Both of the memoir's editions describe Arday stewing at the suggestion by his critics that he was a "diversity hire." In the earlier draft, he laments: "To this day, everything I do is scrutinized for mistakes in the name of 'academic integrity' and challenged in a way that almost never happens to my white colleagues." The later edition removes the reference to academic integrity. The revised sentence reads: "To this day, everything I do is scrutinized and challenged in a way that almost never happens to my white colleagues."

$Benjamin Ryan can find no mention of a fracture and swollen leg in the blog posts Arday wrote at the time of his 30 marathons$

But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

The book sticks mostly to this frantic register, and coincidence abounds. Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.

It would have far better if the matter had been expedited, recognising the gravity of the claims. They were raised by a reputable sector publication, staffed by trained and conscientious journalists, which has no desire to inflict damage on the sector. Instead, the legal threat meant they were picked up by a Substack blogger who knew the potency of what he had found and was ready to draw conclusions that I do not agree with. For me, this was, above all else, a story about potential research malpractice – it should have remained that way.

Extract from the prologue of Jason Arday, Great and Unfortunate Things:

At some point, the aid worker studied me as I bent down to help one
of the children. Then she said quietly, almost to herself but loudly enough for me to hear: "You have a very beautiful heart."
I smiled and swiftly replied, "That's really kind of you."
Then she moved towards me and rested her hand on my arm before
speaking again. "I can tell you're destined to do great things. But I also
believe you're destined for very sad and difficult things as well."
It stopped me cold.
"What? Any more than other people?" I asked, half confused, half unsettled. This woman had just met me. She didn't know anything about me.
She looked straight into my eyes. "Yes. I think so."
We let the conversation drift after that, but her words rattled in my
head the rest of the day and late into the night. The next morning, when I saw her again, I pressed her.
"Why would you say that about my life? About great things and sad
things and difficult things?"

Beavis and Butt-Head

Dave Eggers, The Every

Cover of Dave Eggers, The Every

Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute

The Secret Agent film poster

George Lloyd, Symphony No. 7

Hooper’s Manly States

British Rail app

The original poster does not allow quote posts or comments, even thought this is BlueSky

AI generated slop

Poster for Night on Earth

At some point, OpenAI will simply run out of money. It’s nearly exhausted every available source of capital, and now that it’s likely delaying its IPO to 2027 — largely in part because it couldn’t list at a $1 trillion valuation — it will have to raise again, potentially at a down-round valuation or at a modest increase which will, in turn, make it much more difficult for investors to see a return in an IPO.

Investors will likely ask questions like “why couldn’t you go public?” and “what is it that bankers didn’t like?” as Sam Altman looks at them like this:

[Picture of a big, fat Brendan Fraser looking up tearfully, from the 2022 film The Whale]

You see, OpenAI is awesome at selling mythology and hype, but crumbles the second that its numbers have to face the cold, harsh light of day.

Memories of Bohemia: Antonia Kubalek plays piano pieces by Suk, Janacek, Smetana and Novak

Karajan conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in Bruckner 8

Cover of Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

OpenAI also announced a new generation of voice models, called GPT-Live, on Wednesday. The company said the models can listen and speak at the same time, which means engaging with the models feels "much more like having a real conversation," according to a blog post.