What I Was Wearing, a cartoon by @aubreyhirsch.bsky.social.

Just an update on this which is that today is the day they SET FIRE to the house they spent hours lovingly creating, to recreate the Great Fire of London. It's gone down as well as you can imagine.

101 years ago this week, America's first woman governor was elected. But Nellie Tayloe Ross had never had ambitions of political leadership. Instead, this opportunity arrived on the heels of grief. www.thepersistent.com/who-was-nell...

January 6, 2026: the first time in my adult life that I remembered to leave the house a little bit early to de-ice the car.

My husband and my daughter are downstairs trying to make a Tudor house for a school project and OMG why do schools do this to us? (Another question is why did husband choose the day after daughter was up extremely late to begin this project?)

Good to see Sadiq turning the piss off Reform dial to 11

I met a person on Hootenanny in a pub once and they came to my house and then threw multiple tantrums when a) they found out I was a journalist; b) they then found out I was a *business* journalist who didn’t care about them; c) the mic on my karaoke machine was a bit shit.

We love to see women crushing it in male-dominated industries.

Couple in here from me! Including: - The story of Jane Goodall's sexist boss - Why gentle parenting experts are just three misogynists in a raincoat - What AI's obsession with beauty is doing to us

These are the best stories published by The Persistent in 2025, as picked by our editor @francescadonner.bsky.social. www.thepersistent.com/favorite-sto...

Morning! I'm on the Observer's business desk today so please do DM me if you've got a story.

Extremely funny to call the pope “holier-than-thou”

My kid's nursery Santa photo looks like a hostage situation. Not one child is smiling. Santa has his beard on all wrong. My daughter is gripping her present with the grim determination of someone coming to terms with a deeply traumatic encounter.

I got my phone screen fixed yesterday after about six months of it being repeatedly hurled to the floor by a toddler and I cannot express how nice it is not to get tiny shards of glass in my fingers every time I scroll.

I simply cannot handle this information while awaiting £3k in payments a week before Christmas

The economist @corinnelow.com needs to set the record straight. Firstly, she did not, as has been reported, begin a lesbian relationship because of data - that was a joke. Secondly, the economics of love is broken, and women are losing out because of it. www.thepersistent.com/corinne-low-...

A Swale council meeting was suspended several times after far-right activists heckled, vandalised parts of the council building and intimidated councillors as they attempted to debate a motion to make the area safer for refugees. Life under Reform! www.kentcurrent.news/when-intimid...

Mother and Babies, 1963, painting by Claudia Williams, 1933-2024 (Oriel Môn museum and gallery, Anglesey).

‘Are you hanging up your stocking on the wall’ sounds quite withering, actually, if you say it in the wrong way.

At first, Paris appeared to the writer Brianna Holt to be a city where race didn’t matter. But things weren’t all they seemed. www.thepersistent.com/paris-racism...

I hate feeling hot in the summer; I HATE feeling hot in December.

It turns out the "massive meme to rural infant school" timelag is surprisingly long - almost a full year! I know this because my six year-old has just started saying 6-7.

Worth a read, just for the optimistic idea that billionaires might one day just all piss off to somewhere else, leaving the rest of us to get on with our lives free of their interference. Also am thrilled to see the return of the Seasteading Institute to British media.

When you need a stapler but don’t have a stapler, it’s actually kind of awful.

Making my husband watch Love Actually for the first (!!) time ever and it’s emerged that Keira Knightley was 18 when this came out - so presumably 17 when the wedding scene was shot. It truly does leave no problematic stone unturned.

The way that the gentle parenting industrial complex is on course for a direct collision with MAGA 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Who could've predicted?

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

Emma Barnett on the war path is such a pleasure to listen to.

A friend of mine has been through a very nasty domestic abuse/coercive control situation. I'm trying to help her find support/counselling that isn't horribly backed up with waiting lists. Would welcome ideas - we're coming up empty and the situation is getting increasingly urgent.

We love to see a celebrity normalising infertility! I interviewed Trinny a few years ago while I was in the thick of IVF, and we ended up talking about it for a long time. She was so kind and funny and supportive about it. It made all the difference. www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar...

My kids would 100% vote Reform just to piss me off.

This is a beautiful story but sometimes my 6 yr old picks up a random pebble, looks her sister dead in the eye and says ‘mine’, and then there’s a huge fight about that one random, inconsequential pebble. I’m not sure *all* kids have, as one comment suggests, ‘moral clarity’.

Biggish piece 1/3 filed. Haven't left the house since Tuesday evening. It's fine, I'm absolutely fine.

The best place to store pumpkin pie is in the bin, along with pumpkin soup and also pumpkin spice (which admittedly has nothing to do with actual pumpkins, but is also gross). I will not be taking questions.

A fun thing about being a journalist in 2025 is finding a delicate way to say 'I don't do emailed responses because I keep getting sent AI slop' without it seeming like you are accusing the person you're speaking to of potentially sending you AI slop.

UK Plans £303.7B of Gilt Sales This Fiscal Year; Est. £308.1B

Can we just take a moment for the fact that the speakers today are all women. Chancellor, deputy speaker, leader of the opposition.

£18m for playgrounds. It's not much but it's one of those small things that will measurably improve lives. There's nothing more depressing than a derelict playground.

By far the best part of being freelance is not having to wait for the chancellor to finish before I can have lunch.

Can the man who is braying STFU please.

Chart in the OBR doc showing Labour's manifesto pledge to build 1.5m new homes and isn't going *brilliantly*.

Well this is just the icing on the cake that is 2025, isn't it. Remember taking myself off to see him at Glastonbury while my friends were watching something bland like the Killers. The most glorious performance.

I'm obsessed with Monash IVF, partly because it's one of the few listed fertility clinics, and partly because it keeps putting the wrong embryos in the wrong women, which seems like a basic thing to repeatedly screw up. Anyway, shares are up 45% today after it rejected a $300m buyout offer 🤷‍♀️

It’s Budget week so naturally my youngest has a full-blown fever.

I’m in a returns queue at Zara. Opening a book on how many geological eras will pass before I succeed.

The nursery has just sent cute pictures of the kids making rice krispie squares and then all having a "cheeky lick of the spoon". RIP my weekend.

Just got an ad on Instagram for a company whose main marketing point is that it will prescribe you GLP-1 meds, even if your BMI is healthy. I honestly don't know what to say.

'Can you put it in an email' is honestly the worst phrase in the English language.