… but now it’s taking Jason Arday’s word for things:

In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face… pic.twitter.com/4woPSfDWuK

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) September 2, 2026

For those without access to X:

In a scathing editorial on the Jason Arday tragedy, @Nature credulously parrots claims he made about himself without any acknowledgment on Nature’s part of credible evidence that he was a serial fabulist and that we cannot take his claims, including that he was autistic, at face value.

Nature makes no mention of credible evidence that he committed academic fraud and that he lied about a lengthy catalogue of elements of his life in an effort to burnish the mythology he had built around himself and that came crashing down in July and early August.

Instead, this editorial effectively removes all blame from Arday for the choices he made and the consequences those ultimately yielded. The editorial minimizes the plagiarism accusations and places blame on journalists for investigating his many false claims and on Cambridge for ultimately placing him under investigation—questioning whether the university followed proper protocol.

It is amazing that a news outlet ostensibly devoted to science would blame those who told the truth or sought to determine the truth about someone who demonstrably lied over and over and who was apparently culpable for committing egregious academic misconduct, including stealing another academic’s data.

Yes, some of the coverage has racist undertones at least. But it is illiberal to argue that the media should not have done their job to thoroughly investigate a public figure at one of the world’s leading academic institutions who had evidently conned his way to the pinnacle of academic success.

But Nature is no longer “devoted to science.” I don’t know when that began, but it was certainly the case by the time this letter was written about a year ago. Excerpt:

Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.

The author is a chemist, and she cites explicit woke policies of Nature going back at least to 2019.

I first heard of Nature when I was in law school. One of my roommates, who was getting her PhD in a scientific field, was being published in the journal at a very young age. I remember how excited she was and what an amazing achievement it was considered to be. So I long held the publication in very high esteem; it was considered the pinnacle. I haven’t held that opinion in quite some time, and of course it’s not alone in its decline.