Today's inspirational message:

You would get so many more amazing books if you had Universal Basic Income. Not even the most dream-scenario AI could compete with the creativity of a world of authors no longer afraid of affording rent.

Fun fact about the IOC's one time only, all or nothing, SRY gene test 'to identify men'. It's entirely possible to test positive after being pregnant with a boy. Fetal DNA can cross the placental barrier and linger in the maternal bloodstream for decades.

Nothing but love for the trans people in my family, in my life, and out there in the world. The future will look back on this era in horror, but unfortunately we don’t live in the future. I encourage every cis person I know to speak up, say “not in my name”, to fight for the lives of our loved ones

Seeing people online getting very weird about the ways people repurpose and recycle old books again and this is a gentle reminder that nobody is ever going to sit down and read that 1930's encyclopedia, it's either becoming decor or going in the skip. Please be normal about this.

Post a god or pic of your favourite modern era Doctor Who companion. 🥰

One weird myth in the endless art vs artist debate is the idea that most great artists are/were terrible people, necessitating some kind of separation. They're not though. Most of them are fine. That's why whenever this debate pops up people always name the same few wrong'uns

Fuck This Shit It's 3:00PM

This thread is not meant to deny that your body shape affects how you look in certain clothes. It's also not to discourage you from going to the gym, if that's what you want to do. Only to push back at what I think is often a misuse of this quote.

It is being reported on the ground in Cuba that everyone on a ventilator at this hospital died overnight. As a Cuban, I'm devastated.

Thread, make sure you read the end even if you skip the detail

When you finally wonder if maybe you’ve contributed to a moral panic that has led to the most extreme assault on minority rights since Jim Crow

Kurosawa on watching Solaris with Tarkovsky

My large, powerful, nitwit son The Picts goes to the movies every weekend and demands to see Monsters Inc

Incredibly funny that the president of the United States can do this and retain command of the American Armed Forces, but I said it about a literal Nazi and got fired from a job writing superhero comics.

Abolish. The. Home. Office.

Man I pure love Anna Calvi. Happy Friday

It's time to plant the thumpers It's time to rule the spice It's time-- long live the fighters! On the Muppet Show tonight

see? here's the thing. A lot of people are like, the earth is fucked, it's beyond salvation, it's hit the tipping point, but time and time again we see that if we just fucking fixed the problem, it rebounds so incredibly fast. Imagine what could be done if people actually cared

Joe Kent is neither the worst person you know making a good point nor a broken clock; he’s a notorious antisemite and white supremacist who is blaming Jews to get out of a real job that’s quite difficult right now as we increasingly explode the world and create the conditions for terrorism.

🔴 The Elections Watchdog Doesn’t Know Where Reform UK’s Crypto Donations Are Coming From The UK’s electoral watchdog tells @bylinetimes.bsky.social it wants tough new legal powers to prevent overseas donors from secretly bankrolling British political parties bylinetimes.com/2026/03/16/t...

Useful panel alert

Absolutely no one should be surprised to find trans-hostile activists also back restrictions on abortion access.

sometimes people say it’s good that we know who the racists are but i have some degree of nostalgia for when more fucking racists hid under fucking rocks

I think about this quote from All The Presidents Men constantly- “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand”.

The juxtaposition of the first and second items of business for this Privy Council meeting is hilarious. privycouncil.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/u...

Appreciate the nod. Our bursary, launching VERY soon, seeks to mitigate some of that depression...

🎶Ohhh Mandy, you ne-ver shoulda been hired, then you demanded a cool half million 🎶

Heaven knows that Winston Churchill would never have stood for an animal to be on the back of the five pount note. On an unrelated matter this is the five pound note issued in 1957.

First they banned fox hunting, now they want to force foxes onto our paper capitalism slips

Culture War: 60% of the country are woke eco-terrorists who prefer hedgehogs to brave Churchill

"Fossil fuels should be more expensive but not now" - literally every government for the last 20 years.

ok yes that lrb piece is as good as everyone is saying

This Timothée Chalamet thing is a great example of how things get taken out of context. This interview was from a month ago, and the comments about Opera and Ballet went unnoticed until someone clipped it missing off the first half of what he said, changing the meaning. And sure he worded it badly

Moderate Democrats with columns in newspapers are constantly saying the Democratic Party is way too liberal on "social" issues. Moderate Democratic voters in real life do not feel this way. With some polling data from @gelliottmorris.com and @dataforprogress.org. newrepublic.com/article/2074...

Medical transition for trans kids is now banned for new referrals on the NHS. Trans kids in the UK can still go private or DIY (for now). This means the new clinics that replaced GIDS are close to useless at best, conversion therapy at worst. 1/5

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Politicians and journalists on X keep referencing right-wing obscurities as major political issues, and keep framing major political issues of the day from a right-wing perspective. Getting your perspective from X is even worse and is more misleading than mindlessly following polling numbers.

Your regular reminder that the UK is in fact a high trust society and anyone who implies it isn’t is either selling you a pup or has bought one.

Halas & Batchelor, the British animation studio which produced the "Charley" public information films for the Attlee government, won a nomination at the 1964 Oscars for a short satire of US car culture called Automania 2000. It's absolutely delightful jonn.substack.com/i/189868301/...

Congratulations to the marvellous Dr Fern Riddell and Dr Emily Hauser on their new paperbacks, out today! Both books reframe what we know about famous women from history & myth

Coming soon! The 404 Ink Bursary for small presses and accompanying crowdfunder will launch in mid-March. This will give away at least £3,000 to small presses - we hope to raise more to pay it forward to even more people.

Ffs. There have always been trans people, there will always BE trans people. No law or billionaire is going to stop that simple fact. I have trans people in my life who I love, and trust me, I will fight to my last breath to protect them from the same dickheads who tried to kill me as a gay teen.

This is where the government’s “commercial research exception“ idea takes us. Nasty.

Keir Starmer is once more locked in a death battle with his mortal enemy, Keir Starmer.