“.. American officials did not learn of the outbreak until Thursday, nine days after the World Health Organization did, and almost a month after the first person died.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/h...

Hard to overstate how much the Overton window has been allowed to shift on this. “Labour bans trans women from female toilets” would have caused a political earthquake in the party in, say, 2019.

The Labour Party is a moral disgrace and so is Bridget Phillipson, and any MP that doesn’t speak out loudly and oppose this is complicit.

aaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

"Theresa May supporting self ID" is also important to remember when people do the whole "well I regret how horrible things feel now but you do have to accept the radical trans activists went too far with the nonsense of self ID" thing - no, it had cross-party and general public acceptance!

This is a shocking example of one of the big reasons why, right now, there is no way I’d use AI for any of my historical work. If you don’t look at the documents yourself, and if you don’t know how the AI you’re using was coded, you have no idea what it may be leaving out – or adding in.

If I had a film budget, I'd get Armando Iannucci to make A Bridge Too Far except it's Burma 1943. I want paranoid delusional egotist Noel Irwin getting everyone killed from behind his desk, and paranoid delusional egotist Orde Wingate getting everyone killed up close and personal.

Why can we never have fun food discourse? Why aren't we talking about the fact that Ciabatta is younger than Beyonce?

daaaamn london

There isn’t much left to say except that your children will be less well-rounded than you. Less well-read than you. Less intelligent than you. Less able to problem solve than you. Leas worldly than you. Less empathetic. Less equipped. And more helpless. For the first time in living history.

Crazy how it's always the women's fault, no matter where in the world you are.

The President focused attacks on a specific high school track and field athlete by name and that in itself wasn’t treated as notable news.

she was introducing genocidal legislation against the trans community *six months ago*

A profoundly unserious shower thought: The British Raj was, at least in some regards, the symbolic successor of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal Empire was ruled by the Timurids, claimed successors to Chinggis Khan. Conclusion: the House of Windsor is the last Mongol successor dynasty.

There’s definite plausibility to the idea that the critical thinking which can come from the humanities is in higher demand as AI gets better www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

Man I'm so angry at Labour. As if moving to the right was going to do anything other than destroy them. What absolutely fucking stupid dickheads. Doing all this evil shit for nothing

The UK needs to stop doing individual projects and just doing continuous rail upgrades, because we (as a matter of policy design!) shed expertise pointlessly every time!

Both Reinhard Koselleck and Hannah Arendt held the view (which makes me think it was more than just them) that mass industrial warfare (up to and including nuclear) had rendered revolution the only valid form of political violence in the modern age. Not sure how that stacks up anymore.

Augustus Frederick Lindley (1840-73): Illegitimate son of a minor Anglo-Scottish gentryman, becomes a merchant sailor at 13. Goes to China in 1860, elopes with the daughter of a Portuguese notable, volunteers with the Taiping for 3 years until his wife gets shot and he keeps getting ill.

Name a person who should have a biopic

These people hate modern Britain and everything it represents; they hate everyone who lives here and they hate that we are a democracy. It's that simple.

'Great Lantern at Sensoji Temple' - Kasamatsu Shiro, 1934. #JapaneseArt #shinhanga

"Pope Leo on Friday named a formerly undocumented immigrant who was smuggled into the United States in a car trunk to be bishop of West Virginia." Gift link 🎁 wapo.st/3RcUTj8

Share this widely. Please and thank you.

The role "the Epstein files" have played on the public consciousness is to transform sexual abuse from a societal problem that we all have to collectively grapple with to a baroque conspiracy committed by faraway, unrelatable villains that you get to righteously fantasize violence against.

Reform want "a tomorrow made up of yesterdays" Oh he's still got it

'Must we now deal with this?' feels like the great catchphrase of the current era.

But... but... I thought only Chinese central planning could achieve these kinds of results! The tankies said so!

For all of Starmer’s talk of putting country before party and civic duty etc etc he is pretty straightforwardly doing harm to the country and governance by choosing to prolong the inevitable

Is it bad when your Prime Minister gives a national address on Youtube basically saying relations with the US won't go back to normal - with a miniature figure of a British General killed while defending Canada against a US invasion on his desk. (Isaac Brock in 1812)

I will be more interested when they make this about prosthetics instead of robots. Show me robotics for humans, not robots in the place of humans doing human things, for the love of god

...Jesus Christ.

You've probably seen APA Hotels everywhere in Japan—over 900 properties with that orange-and-black logo. What you might not know: the budget chain places books in guest rooms denying the Nanjing Massacre, written by the founder himself. buff.ly/oQHF9jj

We all know that the threat to women is not coming from the trans community – by me for The Independent www.independent.co.uk/voices/women...

not many people know this, but Barilla has a line of 3D printed pasta it sells mostly to the fine dining industry. I don't want the pasta. I want the pasta printer

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851–64) Gone but not forgotten

Quite a flex to turn up at the presidential palace, get him to confirm you as prime minister, call him unfit to serve with no moral authority, tell him to resign, and then pose for a picture

Your enemy’s enemy is actually not always your friend. No disrespect to the Pope but the Catholic church has a lot to answer for so I’m not jumping on any, ‘Yay the Pope!’ bandwagon. Ditto the Iranian regime, merely because their SM trolling game is good. I can oppose the war without doing that.

Vote as though Labour… - will never rejoin the EU, - will remove as many trans human rights as possible, - will harm trans children as much as possible, - will remove refugees’ human rights Because this is what they are doing.

absolutely incredible ending to this saga

Labour’s manifesto for the Holyrood elections is so transphobic that Scottish Labour Against Bigotry is telling us not to vote Labour.

Incoming Hungarian PM Péter Magyar calls for the UK to rejoin the European Union: "I remember when I was a diplomat in Brussels... We were able to influence decisions. At the time, the Brits were also part of the EU. Let's hope they will rejoin."

The more she talks about it, the less I sympathize with DeWitt. I understand being annoyed at making a short video but if you can’t go to a Starbucks that’s six minutes away without accidents, losing your passport and everything else, then you need serious help and this isn’t about the prize.

Correct.

Appropriate since snakes do not have arms.

Sort of a joint query by both of us – the focus is on Britain but I'd be curious if anyone's written anything on Christian socialisms in Australia, particularly if something of the sort existed in the 1850s.

I don't know how anyone else feels about this, but to me, sharing a screenshot of chatbot output to make a point of some kind is an excellent way to undermine any credibility that might otherwise be granted to you in the context of whatever you're trying to say.

Of course, the more Masterplan comes back, the more how fucking racist Chen is hits you in the face in a way it doesn't in audio and recons. I think if Marco Polo (also entirely white guys in makeup doing funny voices) does ever come back, we'll be in for a real shock.

I’ll be doing an AMA with @askhistorians.bsky.social on Monday! Looking forward to answering lots of questions about George Washington, slavery, and public memory the day before my new book comes out. I had a great time doing this when my last book came out in 2020, should be fun!