Today is Intersex Day of Solidarity and Remembrance. It's an opportunity to highlight the continued struggles faced by intersex people globally, from unnecessary medical intervention or stigma. We all deserve to be treated with dignity, and live a life free from discrimination.

It's time for #Caturday and a timeline cleanse! A terracotta figurine of a #cat playing the harp. From #Egypt, #Roman period, late 1st century AD. On display at Museum August Kestner, Hannover. Have a lovely #weekend! 📷 me 🏺

My hokey, hastily thought out opinion on Celebrity Traitors People shouldn't fear diversity. Not just of race and sexuality though, but of education, skillset, personality type, ambition, financial leverage, cultural taste, sense of humour. Aspiring to monoculture is to waste the richness of life.

A large part of writing for children is trying to work out what level of swearing is acceptable to publishers

Rebel would like to remind you that Saturday is for being daft. Thanks for your attention in this matter.

The year is 2025. It's never cold enough to put the heating on but always too damp to dry anything on the line. The future smells of damp laundry. Welcome.

We all know the difficulty the HE sector is in. But let’s work together to come up with solutions. The nuclear option damages our students & the reputation of our institutions. @ucflangs.bsky.social & @artsandhums.bsky.social are supporting colleagues www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Both parties actively endorsed Andrew Cuomo and he STILL couldn't beat a vocally pro-Palestine, pro-trans, socialist, Muslim immigrant. The vindication I feel IS a part of that obvs coz I'm a petty little cunt. But I mostly feel intense joy and relief that another way has been shown to be possible.

Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).

if you are the public defense investigator who just subpoenaed Sam Altman on stage know that i love you and think you are a wonder upon this earth.

If you have a regional accent, please never try to get rid of it. Accents tell stories.

If one doesn’t have time to read the book, the PBS NOVA episode is a great listen while doing chores! www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaLZ...

Just need everyone to Google the name "Rosalind Franklin" at this moment.

Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...

Fossils in the fabric of the University of Nottingham: Carboniferous corals in the slabs outside the Trent Building, where Important People make decisions. A bad week: the University has announced it is suspending the Plant Biology BSc course I lead, along with many other courses. #FossilFriday

#Skybrarians #GLAMS

there's an entire sub culture of middle age men who are so impervious to other views that at no point have they ever read any of the many comments pointing out that an obsessive interest in student politics is deeply fucking creepy? anyway, this is worse.

Is the new Curriculum & Assessment Review from @beckyfrancis.bsky.social “dumbing down” education — or redefining what rigour means? enserm.substack.com/p/is-the-cur... 🧵 A short thread for school leaders 👇

New work by Joelle-Cathrin Flöther and @julianedegner.bsky.social suggests we should integrate both positive and negative evaluations into measures of social identification. #SocialPsyc #AcademicSky

Google's Gemini Deep Research can now read your Gmail and rummage through Google Drive

There's an interesting study to be conducted on the ways faculty, staff, and students process their renewed access to federal grants coming at the capitulation of the university's future to an authoritarian.

I LEARNED THE ANSWER TO THIS Chris's Steakhouse was a New Orleans landmark Chris Matulich periodically got bored, sold it, waited for the new owner to fail, and bought it back cheap The sale conditions: Can't move it, can't change the name He did this six times Then he sold it to Ruth Fertel

this would mean half of registered california voters voted in an odd year special election with a single arcane proposition on the ballot

City of London lawyer Andrew Milne bought up hundreds of freeholds on homes across Sheffield before advising leaseholders that, if they didn’t pay him exorbitant sums (upwards of £25,000), he’d see them in court. Well done @sheffieldtribune.bsky.social @joshiherrmann.bsky.social for exposing this.

We’re up to 124 wins - including 35!!!! red to blue flips — and 9 more going to run offs. We still have 37 races left outstanding, but far and away the best election night @runforsomething.net has ever had.

"The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's problem"

One thing the NYC mayoral race underscored for me is how easily the phrase "I don't feel safe" can be weaponized. It's an argument I would hesitate ever to use again, even for a good cause. I hope we can all agree that we have the right to BE safe. Maybe we should leave it at that.

Oh god, I laughed loud enough the kids ran in hoping I was watching funny YouTube videos.

I feel like I could live with the brass neck - it is the seemingly successful way that he and others have brainwashed themselves into thinking “our crumbling justice system” has an explanation beyond “we didn’t spend enough money on it” that I can’t stand.

As I just said on discord, I am capable of greatly enjoying the chaos that MTG is about to cause to her own party on her opportunistic swan dive from this sinking ship without ever handing it to the lady who either legitimately believes in or cynically endorses the concept of Jewish Space Lasers.

This city belongs to you. youtu.be/Nf4aPjPu6pk

A man collapsed in the Oval Office yesterday. The internet got the story wrong. My experience struggling to correct the record — including on Bluesky! — and the warning signs as AI, aggregation, and social media increasingly drive our news consumption.

So at this point we have a baseball betting scandal, an NBA betting scandal so I give it about 6 months before we discover that both of these combined are about 2% of the NFL betting scandal

Transphobes are already targeting the biggest star in women's soccer and baselessly alleging she's a man because she's Black. This is what trans people warned would happen. Gender policing that becomes explicitly racial. www.outsports.com/2025/11/6/24...

Ok but this is literally unfair, Ari does one of these maybe once every 2 years, as an Indian kid Zohran has had to do this whole turn everything into my topic thing about 197 times a year at family dinner for the first 25 years of his life

They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm.

Jacky Rosen is one of the more moderate Democrats. She's a pretty even-keeled person and she's been livid this whole week.

I think we need to stop calling it empathy and go back to calling it decency. It isn't a favour you're doing someone else, it's you proving that you aren't a fucking ghoul

Honestly, how do outlets keep looking at a sector in freefall, at 15,000 jobs lost, at maddening spikes in mental health concerns, and not think 'maybe we should hear from the people who actually care about that sector and what it does, and not just from those who've been wrecking it'?

you probably shouldn't let what commentators like Ezra Klein say be the limit of your imagination or determine what you think is politically possible. He doesn't have a clue what is possible.

My middle child used to fall asleep talking, then wake up and continue the conversation as if he hadn’t just slept eight hours. We also used to have a “you must eat six bites of food before you can talk” rule so he would finish his meals.

Every time a tech entrepreneur says “we don’t need to stop global warming because AI will” I want to slap them with a fish that says, “if a superhuman intelligence came into being and we asked it how to stop global warming, it would say ‘stop burning fossil fuels, you fools.’”

HUGE NEWS! Because of Democratic pressure, Oregon SNAP recipients are reporting their cards have the FULL November benefits!   Everyone who called out Trump for using hungry children and seniors as a bargaining chip has WON with tremendous results!!

I cannot emphasize enough how much Zohran Mamdani's campaign was very much about a platform focused on accountability, but also about having fun, fostering genuine connections with its citizens, and reminding people why they moved to New York City and should still want to live there

Did you know a former White House climate advisor flipped a GOP stronghold in Virginia by running entirely on putting a stop to more AI data centers? For @heatmap.news I profiled John McAuliff and a campaign that will be a roadmap for all future anti-AI politicians moving forward.

A big hi to my new followers! This is where I post my writing: www.tom-cox.com Some of it's free but for a min of £2 per month (or £20 per year) you get everything new I post in your inbox/access to a huge archive. All support is hugely appreciated & helps me carry on doing better, weirder work.

Here are the Top 5 Dogs of the week!

Haha yesss. Japanese copyright law doesn't fuck around. Since I get challenged on this a lot: U.S. and Japan are both Berne Convention signatories, meaning the copyright is recognized between countries. They CAN go after American companies. And they are. And I love it. variety.com/2025/digital...

Bit late to this but it's such a clever piece of AI criticism, developing a literary critique of Sam Altman's auto-metafiction story as a way to explore the grave threats to the "intellectual infrastructure" of the humanities - and HE more broadly - posed by AI lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...