I have just heard a Tawny Owl! 🦉💙 @pollyrowena.bsky.social #UKBirding

Christmas Eve #LakeLight. Wishing you all some peace and light.

⭐🎄We're open on Christmas Eve until 5pm. From 4pm you can join in the carols on Moss Parrock and drift in for your last minute presents. After that, we'll be back open again on Saturday 27th December at 10am!🎄⭐

My daughter was in the Brown University library, hiding under the desk | Sarah Ruhl

I dealt with my undiagnosed ME/CFS during grad school by arriving to class at least 30 minutes early so I could stare at a wall and hopefully recover a bit.

The face of a cat who walked up the road to deliver a card and present with us and is so relieved to get home to lie under his indoor tree.

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 80519000: Your work is your own. Your decisions are yours. Whether you use editors, sensitivity readers, beta readers or not, whether you take advice or not, whether the readers like it or not, you call the shots. For good or ill, it stops with you.

Good!! (she writes from bed where it feels like she now lives) If you’re not going to count at least some flipping farm equipment in there then nobody is going to be able to afford to take on a farm at all. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Two Palestine Action-linked hunger strikers taken to hospital

Blesséd Yule to everyone. May what you seek to leave behind you slip into the great darkness, and may what you wish to bring with you blossom in the sun’s returning light. Hold fast. The light will return.

Christmas Miracles do exist!

“As in other seasons, school-age children are the primary drivers of community spread" No actually, children are not the primary drivers. It's not like they are stuck in unsafe, unventilated classrooms by choice.

We've published a new #openaccess article ahead of print in 'Plant Perspectives', in which Sabrina Dookie considers 'Mangroves as Sacred Forests'. You can find it here: www.doi.org/10.3197/whpp... @plantperspectives.bsky.social #mangroves #plantstudies #forests #planthum #envhum

Morocco Flash Floods: 21 dead, 32 injured “Morocco is experiencing heavy rain and snowfall on the Atlas mountains, following seven years of drought that emptied some of its main reservoirs.“

“This glacier is the lifeline of the Lidder and Sind rivers,” says researcher Labeeb Gulzar. “Its loss could reshape the future of Kashmir’s water, agriculture and ecosystems.”

Reposting for no particular reason 👀 (with apologies for uncorrected typos @lithub.com.web.brid.gy). Increasingly think the failure to twig the lies is not just lack of diversity in publishing + adherence to a certain convenient narrative about disability, but a wide failure in critical thinking.

‘Without a redemptive Nature Cure arc, my work was deemed pointless, unsaleable.’ #memoir is so important for helping us consider #Diversity perspectives. An insightful response to the recent Raynor Winn controversy. #BookSky lithub.com/nature-is-no...

Me: bookselling, like writing, is a highly skilled profession that deserves to be taken seriously. Me taking bookselling very seriously:

And again

Paging @pollyrowena.bsky.social

I'm deeply concerned about the wellbeing of prisoners who were involved in Palestine Action protests, and are currently on hunger strike. Some have not eaten for six weeks. A number have been hospitalised. They are all being held on remand - without trial or conviction.

please take this seriously and mask up in public, especially around vulnerable people www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

We urge you to not hold gatherings unmasked in unventilated public spaces. You are increasing the chances of your guests becoming ill or making someone else ill, putting pressure on health services with knock on consequences.

We're so thrilled to be welcoming Erica Hesketh and Laura Sampson to the E&T list! Their collection of beautifully reimagined Japanese folktales set in the winter months will publish ahead of Christmas 2026. Read the story @bookbrunch.bsky.social: www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/article...

Had to pop into the museum at /#WordsworthGrasmere this morning and it’s looking very festive and pretty. Can’t wait to see Dove cottage decked up in all its festive finery.

We don't condone favouritism, but if there was a more exciting bookshop encounter than @witchmountain.bsky.social had today when Bert the tawny owl and his domesticated humans came into the shop for their winter visit, pray do tell. We wonder what the tawny owls who live across the street thought?

If you're in Sheffield, we can deliver by hand, on foot, to any address in the city encircled by the blue line (and we're happy to gift-wrap books, if you like, at no extra cost). This might be useful for any last-minute Christmas orders (last day to order via this method is Tuesday 23 Dec).

Israel has issued an expropriation order to seize the archaeological site of Sebastia, completing years of “biblical” settlement schemes. As Dania Shti shows, this takeover is part of an effort to weaponize archaeology to erase Palestinian heritage. t.co/b2YNY7QmPO

‘Aboud is a West Bank village that has been sealed off in all four directions by Israeli settlements, gates, and outposts, turning daily life into a struggle for movement, land, and survival. As Uday al-Barghouthi writes, this is displacement by design. www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1658...

Just a little festive psa. Infection is not inevitable.

Very excited to be part of this - looking forward to working with my mentor @pollyrowena.bsky.social

‘“I can’t pay my rent with prestige,” one sign said. Another was a mock-up of the cover of Great Expectations, with “Great” crossed out and replaced by “Reasonable”.’ Anna Aslanyan on the strike at the British Library, new on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Wow: Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (named for Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, who coined term "genocide") calls Clinton's remarks "genocide denial." "Young people in the US are not stupid or gullible. They simply reject genocide – something the Secretary might consider doing as well."

medium warm take but I don't think advising PhDs and ECRs to become influencers is going to solve the academic jobs crisis

Winter sunset, wishing gate.

Yes it can be rainy and grey but it's also the most beautiful country on planet Earth.

Did someone say Christmas presents? Available in paperback now as well as the beautiful hardback. Choose #TheCompanyOfOwls this winter!

The writers with established careers think it distasteful to refer to The Writing Career, both too vulgar and too prideful to do so, rather gauche -- to be careering around with all those words trundling after you like tins cans tied to your bumper -- no, they prefer 'vocation', if you must, summons

It's the last meeting of the year of the @openbookreading.bsky.social writing group for Chronically Ill people I facilitate this evening, and December's theme is 'measuring', which gives me the great delight of bringing this @sandrabeasley.bsky.social classic to the group.

Newly announced, Arvon's programme of day time online retreats - a whole month worth of Thursday's in March will bring @mailbykite.bsky.social & I into your writing room - bringing support, guidance & workshops for your wip or something new @arvonfoundation.bsky.social www.arvon.org/writing-cour...

The difference between between France and England? In France royal jewels are stolen from the national museum in an elaborate heist. In England, apple crumble and custard are thrown at the crown jewels in protest. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

AI is a climate issue. AI is a climate crisis.

I'd forgotten 'Beyond Tomorrow' (1940) which was a fascinating little festive ghosty fable about what makes a good life. This year we're kicking off with 'I'll be seeing you' (1944) which we couldn't find last year. Ginger Rogers is on furlough from prison and meets a solider with PTSD on a train.

Why @channel4news.bsky.social have you go another so-called #overdiagnosis expert and not an autism expert on to keep pushing the entirely nonsense claims about overdiagnosis! Please engage your critical faculties!

Remind me again how the duchy of Cornwall had to be publicly shamed into relinquishing its automatic appropriation of unwilled estates on their owners untimely deaths.

I shall be trademarking my cheese shop Queso and insisting no one else in the entire world use the word queso ever again.

Competing for the worst Christmas-in-capitalism development of the decade? Shops using '12 days of Christmas' as a pre-Christmas sales drive. Folks. Please. The 12 days are after your sales period. There's this thing you might have heard of tho where you count down the 24 days BEFORE Christmas.

If the incidence of broken legs were soaring you'd want to know why - not question whether they were being "over diagnosed". Why is mental health illness different? Streeting probably suspects the underlying cause. It's not something Starmer wants to treat. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...