In 2004, District Superintendent Frank Tassone was arrested and charged with

embezzling millions of dollars from his Long Island public school system.

Now, I am no expert in white-color crime in America, but I am an expert in

watching basically everything on HBO, which includes the 2019 film Bad Education

based on this case and starring Hugh Jackman as Tassone. The performances

are stunning and the story engaging, but the uncomfortable thing about this

movie for me wasn't the crime that was committed, although of course stealing

as bad. It was the lies that had to be told about the lies in order to not be

caught in a lie. The discomfort I feel from these kinds of stories

differs from the discomfort I feel watching, say, torture scenes, although of

course boys and girls torture is bad. What's different is that I've never

once tied someone to a chair and broken their fingers, but I have most

certainly lied. Now, of course, lying is bad. It's also something that

academics like Dan Arieli from Duke University happen to study. In a lecture I

watched, Arieli said of lying, it's not about being bad. It's about being

human. At the very end of bad education, there's a scene where Jackman's

character finally fesses up to how it all started. It started, he said, with two

Greek salads and a couple fountain drinks, I fucked up. I used the wrong

card by accident. He planned to settle up on Monday when he returned to the

office, but nobody noticed or even cared really. And so he didn't. And that's how

it started. Arieli's research about dishonesty shows that the brain reacts very

strongly to a first act of lying, but then it adjusts the subsequent lying

...