🧵: As it’s St Patrick’s Weekend, I thought I’d do a thread on one of Ireland’s greatest artists, Harry Clarke. He’s well known to Irish people & in the last two decades he has become recognised as one of the great European artists. Let’s take a look! [1]
NEW
"Oopsie" - the word that means the United States has now tipped into a constitutional crisis
The US federal government disregards a court order and jokes about it on social media
By me
Substack:
emptycity.substack.com/p/oopsie-the...
Personal blog:
davidallengreen.com/2025/03/oops...
The populist right is damaging US science. The UK could be next. New from @kityates.bsky.social
open.substack.com/pub/kityates...
Wotchit
Here is a 2018 conversation between Jeff Bezos and German publisher Matthias Döpfner at a Business Insider event. Presumably, he is as crimson as a Washington State cherry today:
"In the run-up to Brexit, a bleached grinch that nobody took seriously was transformed into a Question Time fixture so permanent, I’m surprised David Dimbleby didn’t use him as a desk"
My bit on the Brexit anniversary for @bylinetimes.bsky.social
www.bylinesupplement.com/p/russell-jo...
Picture of a painting showing a witch in beautiful clothes, black haired wearing a red hair covering and jewels
The Heroines Anthology is open for submissions of poems & short fiction on the theme of witches, witch trials, medicine women, mystics, herbalists, spells, enchantments, shapeshifters, familiars, covens, hags, crones and sabbats. Deadline June 2025
Please share :)
www.writingtheheroine.com
some america first beers spotted in denmark:
I know the feeling!
This is so good from @samfr.bsky.social
He quoted from Biden’s ambassador to Hungary on Orban
“one of the things that is most alarming to me is just how easy it is to actually control people. It doesn’t take secret police. It doesn’t take guns. It doesn’t take gulags…”
You know he’ll go there.
I can’t resist the lure of tiny, extremely niche, museums. So if you’re telling me Birmingham has a Pen Museum founded and run by people who are very enthusiastic about nibs, I’ll be right in there
absolute bollocks. Typical Mail.
Just cos young men *say* it, doesn't make it true! And feminism was not created to give *them* more rights/equality.
Get the fuck over yourselves, lads. Knuckle down. And stop hero worshipping "influencers" like Tate
www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic...
Trump, criminality & the death of decency with Professor @scottlucas.bsky.social.
Why younger people are keener on dictatorships than older ones.
Tick Tock for Tulip Siddiq with @henryriley1.bsky.social.
www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/epi...
One puzzling question is why it just took so long for the DoJ to prosecute Trump, thereby ultimately running out of time.
This CNN piece seems to be a good explainer.
edition.cnn.com/2025/01/06/p...
This should never have been normalised.
The £45bn cost of Labour bailing out RBS is held to be a once-in-a-generation economic calamity that the nation barely survived.
Brexit cost us just as much every five-and-a-half months.
New
The coming battle between social media and the state
Behind the alignment of X and Meta with Trump is a cold business logic — and a position of weakness rather than strength
By me, in todays @financialtimes.com
www.ft.com/content/917c...
This was absolutely brilliant and would be happy to watch all over again….and I’m not that wild on the books.
Passage from a 2015 Spectator column by Charles Moore: In the same column, I also mentioned how boarding-school pupils out expensive items on their parents' bill (and sometimes buy them their Christmas presents this way). I hear of an extreme recent example, suffered by a friend. Haha son went to southern Africa on a school trip, and there shot an impala and a wildebeest. Without warning, the extras in the bill at the end of term included the cost of taxidermy and delivering the heads - in the region of £600.
Often, when paying my rent or swishing some water in a bottle of fairy liquid so it goes a little further, I am reminded of this Charles Moore spectator column from 2015, and the fact that financial hardship knows many forms.
Anything by Shalom Auslander
Bernie Sanders, nailing it again 🎯
A rare example of Betteridge's Law of Headlines not applying
I wrote something like this thread on Byline after the Southport riots. I've updated it here, cos I think (not sure, but think) it might have something important to say about our current crisis with social media, news reporting, and disinformation. Sorry it's long. (1/42)
This appears to be the Truss cease-and-desist letter in full.
So, so tempting to do a close-read post on this, for the public understanding of law.
It is a glorious letter.
“The fact that Zuckerberg openly said that he is enlisting Trump’s help to pressure global regulators to not enforce their own laws in their own countries should concern anyone who cares about global democracy.” www.thebulwark.com/p/zuckerberg...
The cover of the book Parable of the Sower.
Cannot stop thinking about how Octavia Butler wrote a book in 1993 about climate change. It opens with deadly fires in LA in 2025. In the story, a fascist President has just won office with the campaign slogan "Make America Great Again."
She was a modern day Nostradamus. If only we'd listened.
