It's a shame that "defend your culture" always means "hate strangers different from you" and never "enact anti-pollution laws so that you can go fishing with your grandkids the way your grandpa taught you."

If you were horrified watching elected leaders run & scramble because of gun violence, just imagine how my daughter Jaime felt in school running from an active shooter before she was killed. Now, become a part of the solution & only vote for people determined to address gun violence in America.

It’s a crowded category, but I thought what Trump said after the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner was even worse. There’s not a shred of empathy, humanity or basic decency in his body!

It’s good news that award-winning Gaelic drama An t-Eilean (The Island) has been commissioned for a second series, with filming in the Western Isles starting in the spring. Here’s my interview with talented leading actor Sorcha Groundsell! www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/entertain...

From Le Monde …

The cultural destruction of this US government is extraordinary. I get the sense that they destroy simply because they can, as if they reflexively hate everything not made by them or in their image.

you don't say? at some point we're going to acknowledge what every study ever on this subject has said, right? right? www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

My granddaughters’ rats enjoyed their Burns’ supper.

Someone who shares part of my name and (horrors!) some of my distant relatives can go f*** himself.

Thin Ink's 1st issue of 2026: I’m reclaiming the word foodie & rejecting purism while I’m at it. Loving food has brought me joy my whole life. But in recent years it’s also come with guilt: Not vegetarian enough. Not climate-perfect enough. Not “doing it right.” news.thin-ink.net/p/the-real-b...

look at how little effort it takes for someone on the conservative grievance circuit to destroy a life millions of college kids have half assed an assignment at the last minute, you eat the F and move on but the effort to push trans people out of public life will use whatever it can get

That this man was ever elected will be an eternal shame to our country. There appear to be no depths to which his ego cannot drag him down.

Does anyone know if there’s an English translation of “Oma. schreit der Frieder” published?

Wish I had my phone with me on my morning walk. Somebody had stuck a sticky note on a Cybertruck … “2025 Winner of the FiFA Design Award.”

I’m old enough to remember when a ‘remote conference’ just meant a conference where all the participants were aloof, mentally disengaged or emotionally repressed

Lichen collage. On lakeside rock, Northwest Territories, Canada. #lichen #fungi #fungifriends

Hey, if you’re a Seattle/WA author with a book coming out next year and you have a firm pub date, please let me know for potential inclusion in the Seattle Times’s 2026 book preview. (Space is limited but I’ll do my best.) Drop a link either in replies or at my email: [email protected].

We have a friend staying with us and I said, of course she can read & borrow any books she wants. “I like biographies." And I now realize I have thousands of books but maybe only 6-10 biographies. I just don’t read them much. Any suggestions?

I find it weird when US politicos criticize Europe for lack of “free speech.” Personally, after 25 years and as a US citizen, I see (and feel) more constraints on expression in the US than in Scotland. Perhaps I should say, different constraints. What is acceptable varies greatly across the water.

Noah Smith uses the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to presage the current woes of Europe. www.noahpinion.blog/p/europe-is-... May be of passing interest @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social

The moral collapse of US governance is breathtaking. coppercourier.com/2025/12/05/c...

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.’

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” - Garry Kasparov

You know what's worse than the humiliating sycophancy of FIFA? The humiliating sycophancy of the supreme court. It's difficult to stomach that I committed to defend the constitution of this country, and happily did so, yet the senior law officers of the land don't appear to give a damn about it.

An extraordinary interview with Sara Maitland. Despite living in solitude, her life is far from empty. In the interview, she discusses silence as presence and how the contemplative life is a way of being open to truth, not an experience to chase. monk.gallery/interviews/s...

In the Elsa Thoresen retrospective at Cascadia Art Museum, there’s this lovely linen cloth from 1938, signed and sketched by numerous Nordic artists and embroidered by Thoreson. Here’s Kurt Schwitters signature and sketch.

Truly the stupidest cult. Obsessed with a drug that doesn't work against an infectious disease that they don't even think is real.

It’s squid season in the Pacific Northwest. On our evening walk along the pier there were perhaps 50 people, mostly Chinese, fishing, almost frantically. Getting a reasonable catch too.

Making the sign of the very cross indeed …

It’s not where we come from that counts, it’s about where we’re going. Great to meet Afghan Scots children at Maryhill Burgh Halls and hear a lovely rendition of Robert Burns.

This is one of the privileges of working in journalism; the opportunity to talk to people with extraordinary stories. Erika Schulhof died just a few months after I made contact with her, but she never forgot her time in Aberdeen. I tried to do her justice! www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/past-time...

Following a post by a friend, I wrote about Frankenstein, how the novel differs from the classic movie and why the different story matters when we reach for metaphors for AI. creativedifferences.substack.com/p/the-misrem...

The "don't have an extra kid if you can't afford it" brigade get awfully upset when you suggest they don't stay in their £2m house if they can't afford it, don't they?

A serious question for serious people. I only have experience of my family members, so they don’t count. Are Canadians as bad at making tea as Americans?

Bruce Lummy’s typically funny, informative take on the making of tartan. At 7:50 he introduces a “wee woman in Crieff,” my super-talented daughter-in-law Samantha. youtu.be/efy-_DDwhGY?...

I think they should reboot the whole Bond franchise by switching to his brother Michael, and his friend Paddington.

This is a genuinely intolerable reality…

Mr. Rogers once explained to children that in times of distress, watch for the ones going towards the danger. They are the First Responders: doctors, police, fire fighters. They are heroes. Look to them for guidance in times of trouble. RFKjr is NOT a hero. He ran away. youtube.com/shorts/ZXsNk...

Ethnomusicologist, photographer, folklorist, & scholar Margaret Fay Shaw (1903–2004) was born #OTD, 9 Nov. She gave up a privileged upbringing & classical music training in 1920s New York to help build the first proper archive of traditional Hebridean song & folklore www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

If this was a Confederate statue, there are so-called Americans who would be outraged.

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

I have also been locked in because of Outlander. In my case, by Alison insisting I watch it to translate the Gaelic properly.

The wait is nearly over. Tickets on sale tomorrow. Mae'r aros bron ar ben. Tocynnau ar werth yfory.

It has been fun seeing the reaction of the US right to Democrat victories this week, esp to Mamdani in NYC; an apoplexy over policies quite common in well-functioning, happy, productive countries around the world. US "exceptionalism" too often involves a studied ignorance of what works elsewhere.

My Christian faith is one of the things that shaped who I am. I want to build a Scotland where faith and belief are sources of strength, not division.   A Scotland where we come together, across all our communities, to build a better society.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.