But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

A bracing indictment. jewishcurrents.org/the-genocide...

Friday motivation from Gotama, courtesy of Stephen Bachelor

“The real damage Vincent documents is far more fundamental: It is the damage men learn to do to themselves, often in childhood.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/m...

Look, I'm sure that Nolan's adaptation of "The Odyssey" will be fun, but I highly doubt it will be as good as the original.

“For both realist and radical critics, fighting the populist far right with Habermas’s rational liberalism is like taking a typewriter to a knife fight. But in the poignant final sections of the book, Habermas refuses to ‘let defeatism have the last word’.” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Do you remember the famous #Earthrise photo from #Apollo8? On Christmas Eve in 1968, William Anders turned his camera toward Earth and captured the legendary photo. It showed humans a new perspective, with the moon in the foreground and Earth floating in distant space. 🌎🚀🔭📸 buff.ly/s01u0Ww 📸 NASA.

Remember when every leader wanted their picture taken with Greta? She is still that truth teller, they just can't face the truth of their crimes.

“The Chinese exported half again as much worth of green tech last year as America did of oil and gas. The force slowing [transition] is the fossil fuel industry which understands the good news for everybody else as the worst possible news for its future prospects” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The natural world is a wonderful place. This is timelapse video from a few years ago of a marine sponge sneezing. It has mucus inside that traps the sort of particles that might clog it up, and expels them in periodic contractions every 3-8 hours. Atchoo! www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJqI...

“In the absence of global governance, we will depend on the integrity of robber barons and authoritarian apparatchiks to build ethical guardrails around systems already being embedded in tools we use for work, play and education.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Discovery remains a human endeavor and is propelled by the very human quality to see oddities that don’t fit patterns and by probing them more deeply” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/o...

Its carbon atmosphere might give it clouds made out of graphite and diamonds at its core. Bands of storms would trace the world’s lemon-like exterior in the shape of a W while it most likely has a red colour because of dust and soot-like particles formed by the carbon www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/s...

“The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot.” John Banville www.ft.com/content/ce7f...

In related news, the Justice Department also released their version of "Tale of Two Cities."

“A lot of the times it feels like you’re being suffocated. Lots of things change about you, the condition of your skin, you start to turn grey, both in terms of the hue of your skin but also you notice more grey hairs, everything manifests physically” www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Three lines from the Diamond Sutra, however, inspired Bi Gan to begin writing a new project: “the mind of the past is unattainable, the mind of the present is unattainable, and the mind of the future is also unattainable.” www.newyorker.com/culture/pers...

The impact of machines on writing was not the main topic of a talk I gave back in November under the title 'Why Write? A Case for Human Being', but it lowered over it. Looks like the novel-writing machines of '1984' really are with us. More/stranger to come www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

"Polymathic in the best sense.” Almost tripped over my cor-blimey trousers when I learned this morning from this very kind article by John Mitchenson that I am a Zeitgeister. The editor spells my name wrong two out of three times in the first paragraph subscribe.bylinetimes.com/edition/81/z...

Two fantastic books. One full of fabulous imagined beings. The other full of real, but no less fabulous, beings.

Not to be confused with oenophiles

Eight Palestine Action activists are being left to die in prison – all without even facing trial. We must force the government to act, before it’s too late ⬇️ https://goodlaw.social/3e3320

Matthew Goodwin objects to prosecuting this: ‘I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter. Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.’

“The UK has been planning without the tools to test against worst-case scenarios. We’ve now given decision-makers what they need to prepare for climate outcomes they hope never happen, but can’t afford to ignore.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

how then can this one small heart beat

“It is obscene how quickly the right has seized on this horror to advance an Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian agenda… almost gleeful at the opportunity to distract from [a] genocidal onslaught in Gaza by using our pain and grief as a political weapon” www.972mag.com/bondi-massac...

“Real gratitude does not shrink the circle of love. It enlarges it.” www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

“It was a humanitarian act, more than anything else. It was a matter of conscience … He’s very proud that he saved even one life.” www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

“Let’s not forget the other communities that are on the receiving end of horror right now.” Philippe Sands on BBC Radio 4 this morning

7News Australia reports that the hero who jumped and disarmed one of the terrorist shooters His name is Ahmed el-Ahmed A 43 year old married father of two He owns a fruit shop in Sutherland No experience with guns He was walking past He has two bullets in his arm

Beautiful footage from MLK of a murmuration yesterday on Otmoor youtu.be/VE5876-1PS4

“The ‘wilderness of monkeys’ is beautifully indistinct, and being indistinct it allows our own minds to wander around the image. We can’t let it go. In doing that, we touch the mind of Shylock, we understand him to have a mental hinterland of his own, strange images that occur and recur.”

“climate deniers understand the consequences of the science, so they don't accept the science. They know what it means if it's true, so they won't allow it to be true. I think we can learn from [them]”

We (@crossdale.bsky.social, Christina Pantazis, @roxana-pessoa.bsky.social, Tiê Franco Brotto and I) present the first academic peer-reviewed article, studying the criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protest as a global phenomenon. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Today in ‘Humans are mad apes who will destroy themselves, trash the planet and make the angels weep’ www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds” youtu.be/GUgtMB4SSUk

“He’d embrace the refugee and cast the fascist out.” youtu.be/liRd9pjSBDA

🔴 REVEALED 🔴 The Institute of Economic Affairs – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group that "incubated" Liz Truss – was bankrolled by oil giants and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. 📝 Exclusive findings from @desmog.com 👇

1. We've had a huge response to the launch of the Earth Rover Program, above all from small farmers, especially in Africa. Farmers all over the world are highly attuned to the need for a better understanding of soil, and have immediately seen the potential. 🧵 1/10 www.earthroverprogram.org

It's not ignorance. It's not malice. It's not that he's owned by petrostates and polluters. It's ALL of these things! #ScienceUnderSiege

The overwhelming majority of us may be substantially poorer, but Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and others profited hugely, and I'm good with that

"We are living through what may be the fastest advancement in weaponry ever... The speed of warfare will soon outpace human ability to control it" www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

‘Cathomas added that Pontresina people sounded slightly different from their neighbors in Celerina. How far away was that? She pointed out the window: “Celerina is the houses over there.”’ www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Peak copper thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/running-on...

Laid in Dagenham www.theguardian.com/environment/...

“I find it hard to think of any other form of evidence that is more compelling to demonstrate that this is happening, it has been happening for a long time, and we know why, and we understand it, and we can make credible projections.” yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/12/a-30...

Hope at a time when so many things are dark

A Parr for the Winterval

"In a country that has become much safer in recent decades, our failure to address sexual assaults is especially shameful." samf.substack.com/p/the-most-n...

I've been blown away by the generosity shown to my book this year, and wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the books that meant the most to me in 2025—along with a few I'm especially excited to see out in the world in the new year. THREAD