The Jason Arday delusion

Why are delusions so contagious? This is a question I have been asking myself since the terrible news of Jason Arday’s death. Some people seem intent on sustaining the fictional worlds he created for himself, even now. Journalist Peter Jukes is still claiming the former professor really did run “all those marathons”; and that the plagiarism charges relate only to “a couple of citation errors” in his PhD. To maintain this, Jukes is apparently inspecting wafer-thin slices of evidence — an old press report here, a potentially partisan internal university investigation there — while carefully bypassing reams of more relevant material. Others are maintaining Arday’s own accusation that his minority ethnicity was the only plausible reason for all the press interest. They are obsessing over the f