There's a clip of Lowe praising stay-at-home mums which is being shared furiously on Instagram by people who are otherwise quite nice and non-racist. Started pointing it out to people but it got so prolific I gave up.

HOW can it only be 11am when I am this hungry

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

I just challenged a man listening to his phone loudly on the train, who have I become.

Booked a restaurant table for the wrong date. Felt massively embarrassed and sorry for the no-show but it's impossible to get hold of them by phone to actually apologise/get a new booking, so I'm now left feeling less apologetic and more massively annoyed.

Presented without comment (from Popbitch).

After 20-odd years of hiding my deep hatred of Cathy and her stupid boyfriend, writing this felt good.

Know this feeling, amirite ladies

Every now and then I get an analyst note about an air conditioning company called Munters, and my inner early noughties schoolgirl snorts.

One in six couples experience infertility (that's couples, so not counting the single people who struggle). So that's at least one in six votes he's automatically losing. Or maybe there will be a special 'it's not my fault' discount on the barren tax?

A man who likes a navy puffa. Listing here: www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/1...

After a short hiatus we are back at 'serious conversations about putting down the cat' stage. Am painfully aware that if the situation were reversed, she would not blub like this over me.

Six year old this morning: "Today we're going to the cinema! We're going to see Beauty and the Beast." Two year old: "Can I see Beauty and Some Bees?"

The fact that Reform want people to have more kids and also want to end working from home shows how incoherent their world view is.

Can’t read enough about Dame Tracey. She’s just brilliant. When I lived in Margate she was incredibly unassuming - it would take a while to realise the lady on the next table at the coffee shop was an internationally renowned artist.

If any of you metropolitan liberal elites are wondering what’s going on outside London, the answer is: mud. Roads: mud. Pavements: mud. Footpaths and fields and beaches: mud, mud, mud. The ground floor of my house: mud.

Deeply weird contortions going on in this unbelievably long, extremely boring piece by the Heritage Foundation, where it quotes @thevivllainous.bsky.social at length to support its argument, but also cannot bring itself to call her 'her'. www.heritage.org/marriage-and...

My Ancestry-addicted mum has discovered a Huguenot branch in the 1600s and declared us ‘an immigrant family’.

MRI update: all done. No-one warned me it would be 45 minutes of industrial house blasting into my ears. The bit where the whole machine started shaking took me right back to Fabric, room 2, circa 2004.

Going for an MRI later. Have managed to not get nervous by not thinking about it but now I think I feel a little bit nervous. Would love tips if you have them.

Employers are desperate for you to be in the office until things are about to get awkward.

My best scoop so far from the Epstein files is that one of his mates thought the price of a flat at One Hyde Park was "cray".

*sad trombone noise*

Reposting this specifically for @josiecox.bsky.social.

Freelancers: does a point ever arrive where pitching is no longer super cringe? Or must I simply endure this feeling forever?

Obsessed with this chart from Jefferies. What happened to get salicylic acid cancelled?

Instead of renting a hotel room for 2 hours I hear amorous couples are booking tickets to see MELANIA for complete privacy

I Watched That Steven Bartlett Episode So You Don't Have To and shhh, but the guy makes some ok points? Starting with the idea a lot of women don't want to date men because a lot of men don't know how to give or receive love. It's got nothing to do with looks or salary. Which seems... accurate?

If you haven't seen the trailer for this, I encourage you to look it up. The bit where she tells Trump she didn't watch his inauguration "but I will see it on ze nyooz" will truly go down as one of history's great burns.

Just had to go back through some of my work for New Statesman and honestly am not sure I will ever top this piece on councils' crappy investments into crappy business parks. www.newstatesman.com/business/202...

SO tired of takes like this.

Just got a press release to tell me how successful a press conference was 😬

Honestly, I didn't realise she hadn't already gone.

Guy who uses AI to recruit complains about grads using AI to write their CVs. www.ft.com/content/55af...

Was waiting for the cash machine and the guy in front of me said ‘thank you’ to it as he left.

What does he *expect* to get?

My grandma used to have this exact rant after three glasses of red wine.

Good fact from Popbitch.

New (depressing) figures from Molior on London housebuilding: just 5,547 new homes were started in the capital in 2025, 84% down on the figure for 2015. Construction was halted on 5,009 homes, often because the contractor went bust.

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

BBC report at a headline level that Grok will now not make sexually exploitative images any more. An actual reporter comes on and explains that it will do no such thing, and will just make the images invisible in the UK. These are two very, very different things.

Say what you like about AI, but our local estate agent is having an absolute ball with it.

My first time writing for @thepersistent.bsky.social for a while. On when you don't feel you're allowed to grieve. 'Why am I making this about me?' www.thepersistent.com/renee-nicole...

Was properly shocked when I read that the Fed refurb is costing $700m over budget, but then I discovered that the current estimated cost of renovating the Houses of Parliament is going to be somewhere between £7bn and £13bn, so clearly I should never try to renovate a very old building.

Hey look! It’s my stupid face in @theobserveruk.bsky.social under a headline that highlights my relentlessly optimistic nature.

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?)