Our beloved Alice Wong has joined the ancestors. It was one of the great honors of my life to call Alice my friend, co-author & co-conspirator. She was a true genius, a force of nature the likes of which the world has never seen before. I love you, Alice, and am equal parts grateful and devastated

I came to this country as a child refugee. No English, no certainty, no idea what my life could become. Britain gave me refuge. Not on a timer, not with conditions attached, but with a chance to grow roots. A thread 🧵 1/8 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is the politics of blackmail. The alternative is not a Reform government. The alternative is maintaining our international commitments to being a compassionate nation

I for one am quite glad my family was not told to go back to Bialystok or Kyiv when they were "safe" in 1922.

Someone should ask Starmer and Mahmood whether they think the Kindertransport, for example, should have been a return ticket. Whether Alf Dubs, rather than becoming a Labour MP and now Lord, ought to have been sent back with his family to Czechoslovakia once it was liberated from German rule.

I'm imagining someone going round to the elderly Polish refugees in the village I grew up in in the 90s and telling them that Communism had fallen, now they have to go back, don't darken our door anymore and I get *so* angry.

I wrote about a potential IOC ban over transgender, intersex and DSD athletes and how that ties in with the tragic death of Lia Smith here in the U.S. Mostly, I ask is anyone going to care about those who have been hurt the entire time by this movement?

Thames Water is a gangster racket, instance no. 30632074 www.theguardian.com/business/202...

In line with much other research, the article *does* find that trans kids are more likely to experience bullying than many of their peers. But screen time is not the problem - transphobia is.

Ghosts Behind Glass has been officially published by @uchicagopress.bsky.social! If you are looking for an absolutely gorgeous book that tackles a deeply serious topic, this is a perfect choice. Would make a really thoughtful Christmas gift. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

It's why Labour is always happier when it's second in the table

heads up #histSTM people - nominations are open for the @bshsnews.bsky.social Pickstone Prize - best scholarly book (in English) published in the last 2 years. Don't assume your publisher will nominate you, be proactive about your book or books you love! 🗃️

'Google Meet' just sounds like the Torment Nexus-ed version of Peter Serafinowicz's Internet Ham.

Not the passenger pigeon at the dawn of the 20thC, but now, in 2025. "No books, no popular press, no documentaries, no Tweets, no reels, no local story tellers, no global presence at all. Without a story, this tiny David fell before the modern Goliaths of progress, disconnect and indifference" 🪶🌍 😢

More from @adamrutherford.bsky.social on Hitler.

Over 11,000 people, mostly women and children, are missing in Gaza. The vast majority of them are likely dead. That puts the total number of Palestinians killed directly in Gaza at over 80,000. www.972mag.com/search-gaza-...

I do sometimes still read the AI scam things and they end up so unintentionally hilarious with word choices that no human being would ever make. "vegetable man" "marching back with her printing press"

spending the first year in power appeasing the racists in an attempt to win over reform voters who will never vote for him then going "somehow, racism has returned" the second he finally sees people are abandoning him for the greens

“When I was [at the BBC], at the height of Boris Johnson’s strength, that fear was ubiquitous. Scripts were sometimes written with a view not solely to their impartiality or truth, but the management of perception of impartiality from one side of the spectrum.“ @lewisgoodall.com

new political compass just dropped

#jobfairy - if the US is still a safe place for you to work this is a fascinatingly specific #histSTM job 🗃️

Tomorrow (Monday, Nov 10) the tables are turned: I’m the guest on the Greenhouse #envhum book talk to discuss Ghosts Behind Glass with @finnarne.me & guest host @medievalpenguin.bsky.social Join us online for the discussion! 4pm CET/3pm GMT/10am EST newnatures.org/greenhouse/e...

I love publishing with @aeon.co. In this article, come for the UAPs (!), stay for the Martian canal-builders - and the history of how they changed our ideas about the environment, our future, and our place in the universe. #EnvHist #Aliens #Mars #History aeon.co/essays/in-th...

This semester I taught Frankenstein which references Paracelsus, actually Pseudo-Paracelsus, and here's how to create a basilisk: "Then the Basilisk grows and is born out of and from the great impurity/ of women/namely on the menstruum and on the blood of the sperm, 1/x #earlymodern #16thC

Associate Lecturer in Archaeology (Education and Scholarship) University of Exeter - Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) #skystorians 🗃️www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPI165/a...

Not only does the UK government waste vast sums of money on demonising those seeking asylum, now it appears that they are complicit in quite a number needing it in the first place. Choosing to save money over a genocide, again. #r4today www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

We're hiring in history of science at UW Madison! TT Assistant Professorship with a focus on water. Joint appointment between the History and Integrated Liberal Studies depts, and part of a university-wide hiring cluster on earth/sustainability science. jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/profess... #STS #HSMT

Reviving Cesare Lombroso‘s 19th Century theories of criminal physiognomy, but now for HR to narrow down the applicant pool.

Monk addressing gathering of medieval scholastics: "Right, now that we have dealt with 'whatness', 'isness', 'thatness' and 'thisness', I think we're finally ready to get down to 'business'"

ladies and gentlemen, here is the cause of the breakdown in the relationship between one of history's top classical composers and one of history's most important philosophers:

Pretty extraordinary story here www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc....

Finally got my hands on a rare find: Sonja Buckley’s autobiography. She was instrumental in the development of tissue culture techniques for virus isolation & study, which required CONSIDERABLE skill pre-gloves, BSCs, & mechanical pipettes - & was the first person to isolate Lassa virus.

fucking hell

When children going missing from Home Office and local authority care was flagged couple of years back #r4today presenters uncritically repeated claims children were "voluntarily trafficked". It was an angle used by politicians, and still the idea of protecting kids is dismissed as a "pull factor"

'His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe...when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.' 1/3

🦇🩸⚰️ Happy Halloween! 🧛🩸🦇 Same-sex sexual behaviours in bats were first documented in 1895! Here's a more recent study: www.italian-journal-of-mammalogy.it/Same-sex-sex... #Halloween #HappyHalloween #histsci #histbio #STS #GLAM #queer #lgbtq #queernature #PrideInSTEM 🌈🗃️

More information coming out now on this. Looks like a Cabinet Office scheme led by Georgia Gould… planned savings of £10m-£30m a year (back up lower Premier League full-back price) don’t really seem worth the candle if this the result IMO.

more evidence for my "malazan is just a series about posting" theory

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term www.gov.uk/government/p...

Are you looking to read some new scholarship over the winter? Check out this amazing list of books that I have available to review for H-Environment! Spread the word! #envhist #envhum #ecocrit #aghist #landscape #conservation #sustainability #anthropocene #waterhist docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Victorian attitudes towards birds of prey in the UK are fueled by sensationalist fear-mongering like this, published routinely by mainstream media. #RaptorResearch raptorpersecutionuk.org/2025/10/28/a...

If you see this, quote with a vampire that isn't Dracula

In @yougov.co.uk polling of the trans community, to the best of our knowledge the first of its kind ever conducted, an astonishing 84% said Britain is “fairly unsafe” or “very unsafe” for trans people. goodlaw.social/ncfw

New Job Ad! Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is looking for an Activity Plan Coordinator to lead on the reimagining of its iconic Palm House. 📅 Apply by 9th November 🔗 Find out more: gem.org.uk/jobs/activit...

Interesting thread on the history of actor network theory.

i made a helpful reference

It's time for another entry in our irregular series #MysterySeabirdDistribution! Orange: breeding Purple: year-round Blue: non-breeding Answers on a postcard.

I made you all a fun new gif you can use whenever you see ai nonsense polluting the internet:

A friend of mine in Chicago just shared a video on IG of an ICE operation near her house. The operation happened just minutes before the neighborhood Halloween parade. ICE used tear gas and multiple parents had to wash their kids' (including toddlers) eyes out.

Philosophy & neuroscience of smell, some of my key refs (1) Smellosophy (book) www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067... (2) Smell is spatial link.springer.com/article/10.1... (3) No odor objects www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy... (4) No neural map/representation onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...