In the headlines
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are planning to move back to Britain later this month, but are not expected to reprise their roles as working royals. Harry and Meghan will move into a private, non-royal residence with their two children, who are already enrolled to start at an English school in September. Asylum seekers arriving in Britain are being handed new official guidance on how to behave, after growing concern about differing cultural values. The nine-page Home Office document, published yesterday, explains what rape is and that domestic abuse is illegal, and tells women that they are allowed to study, work, earn their own money and choose who they marry. A personalised cancer vaccine has succeeded in a large final-stage trial, paving the way for a new generation of tailor-made treatments. The US jab, which was given to patients with melanoma following surgery and accompanied by an immunotherapy drug, significantly extended the time patients remained free of cancer and reduced the risk of the disease spreading.
Comment

Hilary Cremin talking to Arday on BBC News in 2023
The “cruel” academics who did for Jason Arday
Since the death of Jason Arday, says Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, many have tried to paint the 41-year-old academic as the victim, and those who pointed out his many lies as the villains. The critical race theory guru Ibram X Kendi suggests Arday may even be vindicated after an accounting of the allegations against him. Bear in mind that, alongside the well-documented plagiarism (always from less powerful academics) and simple fabrication, Arday claimed to have appeared in a documentary series that took place before he was born. Nevertheless, the hapless Good Law Project has persuaded dozens of Cambridge bigwigs to sign an open letter calling for an investigation of “the press”. The media’s alleged crime: writing about this extraordinary case of a “habitual liar’s appointment to a distinguished academic post”.
Reporters were unrelenting, but con-man stories are always popular. The press’s obsession was in proportion to the outlandishness of the lies told by Arday, and to the understandable public interest in the serious failures they revealed. Those failures were intellectual, institutional and even legal. Arday called the cops on a fellow academic who raised plagiarism concerns, and on a journalist from the Times Higher Education supplement, after first instructing the notorious libel law firm Carter-Ruck to send him a threatening letter. The police, shamefully, told the reporter to back off. For so many to focus now on those who challenged Arday’s lies, rather than on the lies themselves, shows that lessons from this miserable episode remain unlearned. The people who should be taking responsibility are the “cruel and heartless” academics – like Cambridge’s Hilary Cremin, who went on the BBC and told Arday he was “the best in the world” – who elevated a fragile and disturbed fraud into a position from which he could only fall.
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Zeitgeist
I’m obsessed with the Instagram account @hotdudesreading, says Celia Walden in The Telegraph. The premise is fabulously simple: every day, it posts images of handsome men reading books. They can be in packed Tube carriages, chichi cafes, South Korean airports, Florentine footbridges, anywhere. There’s a strict “no Kindles” policy, and the captions are “hilariously predatory”, like this, from California’s Westport Beach – “Bad news: that book is about to get sandy because I have absolutely no intention of letting him finish it.” You’d be crucified for writing this stuff about women. But “the predatory female gaze is having a moment”, and I’m all for it.
Inside politics
Reform’s decision to suspend the former Conservative pundit Tim Montgomerie from the party for criticising its leadership is yet another sign that Nigel Farage’s confidence is “shattered”, says Ian Dunt in The i Paper. Ideologically, Montgomerie is a true friend of Reform, and he’s also “courteous and gently spoken”. A confident leader would recognise “how appealing” Montgomerie is, with his ability to “conceal the hardline ideological character” of the movement. But Farage is so desperate to assert his authority after a litany of failures, that he’s willing to lose one of his “greatest assets”.
On the money

Karwai Tang/WireImage/Getty
British actor Tom Holland, who stars in this year’s two biggest blockbusters, is in line for a very tidy payday, says Laurence Phelan in The Guardian. The 30-year-old earned around $20m upfront for his leading role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and following its extraordinary success at the box office is likely to receive a further $80m in backend bonuses. It makes the $10m he earned for his performance in The Odyssey look rather measly by comparison.
Comment

Have some shame: electric bikes scattered on a London pavement. Martin Pope/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty
Society could do with a little more shame
As a lifelong devotee of John Stuart Mill, says James Kirkup in The Telegraph, I have always championed the liberalism of British society. But even I can see that it has gone too far. Consider some of the low-level blights of modern life: shoplifting, listening to music without headphones on public transport, leaving electric bikes tipped over on the pavement, or lighting disposable barbecues in the middle of a drought. In all those cases, it’s regularly argued that they have become more common because of weak enforcement. But their “miserable rise” is less about weakening policing than it is about “weakening social norms”.
Britain badly needs to “regain a sense of shame”. Take shoplifting. It’s a crime that has never been subject to the full force of the law, but fewer did it because they “feared the social cost”. Today, some 47% of young people think it’s actually acceptable to steal from a “large company”. It should have been unthinkable to take a tin tray of coals and ignite it on the bone-dry ground this summer. Yet for lack of shame, the government was forced to ban them. This selfishness is the product of a liberalism that has morphed into “hyper-individualism”: a pervading sense that you can do what you like because “everyone else does”. We’re doing ourselves no favours by leaving bad behaviour “unchallenged” – better to be a “bit less liberal and a bit more judgemental”. Instead of tutting and sighing at the rude idiot with the blaring speaker, we should politely shame him and tell him to turn it off. If we want a harmonious society, we need to remember it’s the job of all of us, not just the police, to “maintain order”.
Quirk of language

Korean folk art depicting a tiger smoking a pipe. Kim Myung-Sook
Every culture has its own way of saying “once upon a time”, says Heather Wake in Upworthy. In Japanese, fairytales traditionally open with “Mukashi mukashi, aru tokoro ni”, meaning “long long ago, in a certain place”. A classic Korean opening translates as “Once, in the old days, when tigers smoked tobacco”, while Basque stories begin with “This happened in the time when all animals and all things could speak”. Eastern European languages like Polish and Czech locate stories in space rather than time, typically opening with “beyond seven mountains” or “beyond seven lands and seas”. To see more, click here.
The Knowledge Crossword
Staying young
The latest slightly horrifying plastic surgery trend is “zombie filler”, says Charles Trepany in USA Today. The gnarly procedure involves being injected with fat from a human corpse, and is being used in facial rejuvenations, breast augmentations and Brazilian butt lifts. The spike in its use is thought to be the result of the Ozempic age, which means that many of those wanting to make tweaks don’t have enough fat of their own and must instead turn to “other sources”.
Snapshot

Snapshot answer
It’s the first bluefin tuna to be landed in the North Sea for almost 90 years, says Steve Jones on BBC News. The colossal catch, which weighs 338kg, was hooked off the coast of Whitby, North Yorkshire on Sunday, and dragged behind the boat for about five miles before the anglers could reel it in. The past 10 years has seen the return of large numbers of bluefin tuna to the south-west coast, but the Whitby catch is thought to be the first landed in the north east since 1939.
Quoted
“I’m all for the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”
From Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day
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