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‘Great and Unfortunate Things’: The UK’s Next Step along ‘The Salt Path.’

Professor Jason Arday’s upcoming memoir should remind the Brits that stories too good to be true are almost always too good to be true. Although Simon and Schuster is sticking with its decision to release the book in a few days, it’s increasingly clear that its powerful content has a lot of bullshit to it, just as Arday’s scholarly work seems to have a lot of plagiarism to it.

Whether it’s the Salt Path’s powerful story of overcoming, or Great and Unfortunate’s powerful story of overcoming, we don’t seem able to overcome our powerful need for stories of powerful overcoming. If we were able to overcome this need, we could see hoaxes coming.

Margaret Soltan, August 2, 2026 1:29PM
Posted in: hoax

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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truffula, commenting at Historiann

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Dagblog

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Dissent: The Blog

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Perplexed with Narrow Passages

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