Post a book you love from the 1980s. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. ‘Masquerade’ Kit Williams

Will continue to post this for as long as is necessary.

💔#YNWA

Halfway mark on the annual Christmas fridge jenga challenge.

Iconic performer Leigh Bowery in a Christmas card photo, c. 1986

Important publication (by @ginnybraun.bsky.social and co-authors) to add to any critical AI reading list. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

📃 NEW PUBLICATION 📃 I’m very happy to see this article published in the latest issue of @meejatheory.bsky.social. The article conceptualises the generative role of audience antagonism in the mediation of reactionary politics and is available to read open access here: lnkd.in/ew5jr-Yh 🧵

Happy Holidays from Sparks! 🎄✨

Loving the Icelandair Yule Cat, the original ad is here but look out for the parody spin offs.

This is it! Falling for reactionary BS about "free speech" has led us to basic rights being actually threatened and removed They never wanted debate or discussion, their point was always about putting the very humanity of marginalised communities back in the balance

Mary Jo Van Dell, Solstice (2023) oil on linen 86.6 x 86.4 cm

Jennifer Jokhoo "Rising Tide, Winter Solstice" 2014 14 color-layered Reduction Linocut Print

I heard a bird sing In the dark of December A beautiful thing A sweet to remember "We are closer to Spring than we were in September." I heard a bird sing In the dark of December

Woo hoo ! 🎉

Karen Carney for the win!!! #strictly

Ambleside, 1786, painting by Francis Towne, 1739-1816 (Yale Center for British Art).

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

Turtle Doves aren’t just for Christmas – but their numbers have plummeted by almost 99% since the 1960s. The RSPB need your help to save their gentle, purring song. www.rspb.org.uk/donate/turtl...

rent goes up, ideas go down. a big, expensive plagiarism machine won't fix that.

A decade and a half of flatlining productivity; the utter hollowing-out of the local regulatory and service state; several years of almost-zero aggregate growth; a politics that suggests all problems are foreigners' fault; literal riots against helpless refugees; an overt racist topping the polls...

WTF are we doing here, BBC?

Also we've fetishized "debate” in these spaces as some kind of civic good, when what matters is competence, trust, shared purpose. Medicine, engineering, boardrooms aren’t organized around debate or requirements of false balance. We've poisoned public discourse by insisting it be adversarial.

Adam Bienkov has been such an important voice in a media landscape which has consistently enabled the far right and racism while pretending to be concerned about it The same applies to politics and academia where euphemisation of far-right politics has been the norm This is why we got here

'Chris Parkes, a senior lecturer in history education at King’s College London, told Times Higher Education that “to be a trans person in the UK right now is to be exhausted and terrified”.' 1/3

Read this whole thread 👇

Nice view with my coffee this morning

The fact is no presenter has ever had to leave the BBC for expressing conservative views, or even explicitly endorsing a right-wing party. Was never a problem for Jeremy Clarkson. Was never a problem for Andrew Neil. Was never a problem for Alan Sugar

My position on taking action. And on the important space between everything and nothing.

What a shining star he was, sad news indeed.

“I’m no stranger to targeting by the far-right - if anything, it’s getting worse the more I look into it. And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t questioned my role in the sector and how useful it is” @nicolakellywrites.bsky.social speaking for many of us in this vile time

I hadn't realised menstruation also came up in the Peggie case. I would love these people to answer, why is it inherently more degrading for a trans woman to see one's menstrual blood than a cis woman? Bonus points if they can do it without saying 'biological male'.

Source unknown

Fonts are in the news, so I'm going to take the opportunity to port over an old thread: what was typography like in the Soviet Union? Spoiler: they did not just have 1 font everyone had to use. As a matter of fact, there were 39. One of them, you can see here, used to great effect for "Chernobyl."

Vivid memories remain of our National Trust report, an audit of existing research on country houses' colonial histories. Here is a recent open access article about The National Trust and future possibilities for exploring colonial history by Jessica Moody. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

At Lincoln Cathedral for the carols by candlelight.

Radio 4 and BBC and Channel 4 News and all the papers completely skewing the Peggie story so your average person will have no idea what actually happened. Doesn’t this make you furious? Integrity in journalism is dead, not just in the US

A media analysis task for a tutorial: What does the choice between "wins part" or "loses most" in a news headline tell us about the editorial choices in covering a news story? (And why is it never 'loses most'?)

Narrowly avoiding a head on collision taking my teenager to school was not the cardio workout I was looking for this morning.

If only there were a cautionary tale about being too eager to accept the apparent time-saving capabilities of new technology.

then, the transphobes , feeling victorious at how many people they have made unhappy and despairing in the previous week, move on to anything else that has a spectrum and the possibility of more colours than they can conceive - such hateful people - they cannot understand anything that is not THEM

Elon Musk shares far right advocate and former holocaust denier Peter Sweden to explain that remigration isn't far right

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

There is no progressive or feminist case for pronatalism because pronatalism involves changing women’s (and men’s) preferences and behaviour. If you care about birthrates, focus on changing society not individuals

You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. - Seamus Heaney, "Postscript"

The words the happy say Are paltry melody But those the silent feel Are beautiful ——

Elon Musk is a global enemy to democracy.

*Camp of the Saints* is one of the fundamental texts of global white-supremacism.

This is a list saying MAGA will actively try to manipulate EU member state politics and try to dismantle the EU. That is what sovereign nations mean in far right EU speak. It is an Orban line.

This should be the top of the news this morning in the U.K. but of course it isn’t.