When the father of a murdered son makes a public statement saying "we do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension", then I believe it's incumbent on any news outlet reporting on Farage's comments to ensure people know he has chosen to disregard the family's wishes.

Remembering my brilliant weird friend Jamie, then 23, and all those killed in Cumbria on 2nd June 2010 - the last time we had a large-scale gun massacre in Britain. An event so bizarrely disappeared from collective memory.

Today’s sign in British Sign Language is: #Bookshelves #📚 ! I share a new BSL sign every day – perfect for beginners, learners, and sign lovers! #books #IKEA P.S. I’m from South UK, so some signs might be regional! Let’s celebrate language and inclusion together #BritishSignLanguage

And don't even get me started on Google translate. I don't bother bc I tested it briefly after they said it was much better. First, if you paste the same text in multiple times, you get different results - it just randomly picks from lists of synonyms out of dictionaries.

Heatwave: As mercury rises in Delhi, survival comes before safety for informal workers https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c172yyvp55do

Serendipitous discoveries in the archives and stacks aren’t possible if you shut them down “The document – a scrap of parchment inserted into an account of the Ramsey Abbey manor of Warboys in Huntingdonshire…”

Oh dear, institutions

🚨 Tomorrow at Brick Lane Bookshop 🚨 Join Xiaolu Guo for the launch of Call Me Ishmaelle, her sweeping reimagining of Moby-Dick from a female perspective. 🗓 27 May | 7pm 🎟 bricklanebookshop.org/product/book...

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

When gay marriage finally became a legal thing, it was the law catching up with customary practice. When we finally decriminalise drugs, it will be the law catching up with customary practice. When the law tries to define things against customary practice, the cart is trying to pull the horse.

Bhattacharya’s legacy The US had a “world-class Ebola lab in Frederick, Maryland, with the NIH,” designed to develop vaccines & treatments. The lab would normally be swinging into action. “But that lab was shuttered last year, with staff laid off abruptly”😢 www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

Oh Freddie #totp

Sing the song about the street cleaner who gets a boat #TOTP

Of course the best version of Shiny Happy People was performed on Sesame Street (look it up you won't be sorry) #totp

Tuned in after being stuck on buses all evening, wary of Westlife, but it’s Shiny Happy People! Phew. #totp

‼️ *EMERGENCY TRANS DEMO* 🏳️‍⚧️ 📍Parliament Square 📆 Saturday 23 May 2026 ⏰ 11AM 🚝 Nearest tube Westminster (step free access) Join us tomorrow, Saturday 23 May at 11AM in Parliament Square. Bring sunscreen, water and your rage! *One struggle, one fight* ✊🏳️‍⚧️

It's just obvious that there is no good reason, at all, for the government to legislate what toilets you can go into. This is a thing that civil society was quite capable of working out. We're here because the GCs found civil society didn't share their rabid obsessive hatred so they played the refs.

Siri Hustvedt kindly stopped by today to sign some copies of GHOST STORIES, the tender memoir of the forty-three years Siri Hustvedt spent with her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. Signed copies available here: www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/ghost-...

if you're cis and you are asked by your management to police bathrooms, "can you confirm in writing that you are ordering me to approach customers to discuss their sex?" is an email no manager wants to reply to

Today I’m thinking about how when we were twelve we‘d be given a topic to present an assembly about and the go-to lazy start was reading out the dictionary definition

Twin Peaks: Maddy screams in terror.

Trans people are not “fighting for unpopular positions that society isn’t ready for.” Trans people are fighting to KEEP the rights we have enjoyed for decades. We have been able to legally change our gender markers since the 70s and before. Same with bathrooms, sports, youth, all for decades.

This headline is fuel for the right-wing anti-migrant reaction machine, but the article reveals the employer knowingly brought her to the UK under a visitor visa to employ her, then denied her a work permit—and most importantly!—refused to pay her any wages. This looks approximate to modern slavery

Honestly, Christopher Nolan has pulled off a major psyop. Instead of deploring this clunky, past-his-peak filmmaker getting his mitts on a classic tale, decent people feel obliged to defend casting choices, something we can't actually judge until we see the damned film.

Rousseau said that the greatest trick ever played was that the rich managed to get the poor to use their strength against themselves. That was in 1762. You would have thought we would have seen through it by now.

We mustn’t hand power over toilets to the worst people, whatever we happen to think about the detail (although I hope it’s obvious the law has not hit upon the solution). It is power and it is dangerous in the wrong hands: I will not comply with hate

These stories make me wish for a world that values administrators and UX design properly. You can be a ‘creative’ and also know how to make and use a wicked spreadsheet, kids

Really enjoyed this conversation with David Runciman about Labour's current crisis and its potential future as a party

There’s a LOT going on as researchers and public health experts race to respond to the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak in DRC and Uganda before it grows bigger. Some really important questions still open, but also a few answers coming into view🧪 My overview in @science.org is here (and thread coming):

Am I actually moving forward in this phone queue, or are people ahead of me just quitting?

Quite hard to save for your pension when you are paying off someone else's mortgage.

Everyone knows it was originally 'a norange' and 'a nuncle', but did you also know that it was originally 'a ninkjet printer'?

I met PP at a fundraising event in 2014 and she was very chatty and fun, added me on Facebook....where she posted anti-Muslim screeds every other day. Islamophobia was her first love, the TERF train came later.

"This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate." rofl

London tube strikes called off at last minute

Unbelievable!

Do what's right for your own healing. Always. Whether or not you forgive is your thing. But NB "forgive" doesn't HAVE to mean "tell them you forgive them" & it CERTAINLY doesn't have to mean "let them back in your life" & ABSOLUTELY doesn't have to mean "give them a chance to do that shit again."

It is ten years ago today since one of the funniest moments of my life.

Seen a surprising number of London drivers do illegal stuff that threatens vulnerable road users in full view of police cars of late, with no action taken by those police. So that’s nice

A rally for bullies is not a protest

i now feel pretty confident in my expertise in a few fields but no one, i mean really no one, can keep up with all of the literature on eg witchcraft, or French criminal justice history.

If you totted up the sums for every financial scandal in British politics (£2k per parliamentary question for cash-for-questions, £200k for Johnson’s No 10 renovation, the cost of that very nice campervan) even with second tier stuff like Rayner and Polanski, would you get close to £5mn *in total*?

Today’s sign in British Sign Language is: #Change #👍🏼   ! I share a new BSL sign every day – perfect for beginners, learners, and sign lovers! #movinghome #movinghouse P.S. I’m from South UK, so some signs might be regional! Let’s celebrate language and inclusion together #BritishSignLanguage

The winning combination of Royal Mail and Thames Water have just managed to warn me of possible disruption to the supply several days in the past. They both somehow manage to use email when they want money.

I admire the determination shown here www.vice.com/en/article/s...

Nigel Farage’s partner, a former waitress not known to have any private money, bought a £1 million house for cash shortly after he secretly received £5 million from a Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire - the same house that he claimed, months previously, that he was about to pay for himself.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... This is good news

We lost Douglas Adams 25 years ago today. This has made a lot of people very sad and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Note that women overwhelmingly kill their partners to escape their abuse, while men overwhelmingly kill their partners because a) the partners want to escape them, b) they want to marry someone else without loss of money/property/control of offspring, or c) both the above.

Thanks to @adrianhon.bsky.social I have now played three #jubensha games, chatted with a delightful selection of people who have now also played jubensha, and learned tons of fun stuff from a series of pithy talks from the experts. A successful weekend!