Simon Thomson

Oh my god the only thing missing is jingling keys and him laughing and clapping like an infant

I very often disagree with @lewisgoodall.com but he’s a great political writer, and often so precisely accurate that it stings. open.substack.com/pub/goodalla...

Sánchez: “You may have heard that Spain is alone. They’re the same people who said that when we recognized the State of Palestine, and then others followed.

“We are not alone — we are the first. Those who will end up alone are the ones defending the indefensible.”

I knew I had seen a similar thing somewhere before

Labour is a far right party

One Year On: 13 people on the ruling that changed their lives On 16 April 2025, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on their biological sex assigned at birth. Forget the rage-bait headlines and attempts to divide us through...

my first piece (cowritten with Catriona Innes) in a print magazine comes out today: we interviewed 13 people, mostly trans women, about how the Supreme Court ruling has affected them for Cosmo UK

www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a...

Ach nuts. Keep buggering on though. Pushing the boundaries of the field inevitably means knockbacks, but you'll drag us all forward with you in the end.

Katherina Reiche steht vor dem Scherbenhaufen ihrer Energiepolitik. Der Gaspreis an der europäischen Börse hat sich jetzt verdoppelt (+100%) gegenüber dem Stand vor Beginn des Iran-Kriegs.
Die offene Frage ist, wie hoch wird er noch gehen, wenn die Straße von Hormuz weiterhin geschlossen bleibt?

In the last decade, the Atlantic has not platformed a single trans person to speak about issues affecting them or the broader trans community. Not a single one. Yet, they have monthly screeds by Helen Lewis and endless money to pay random transphobic grifters to pump stuff like this out.

I’m honoured and delighted to have been invited to chair the upcoming online launch of @lukaempf.bsky.social’s book on Thurs 19 March 4.30-5.30pm CET.

Info is in the attached flyer—please share widely, and join us!

Many alleged suicides of Black trans women are in fact modern-day lynchings, report finds Jill Collen Jefferson, the founder of JULIAN, explains what happens when a transgender woman’s death is ruled a suicide and a community calls it something else.

This is terrifying

www.advocate.com/news/crime/b...

Eine Chronologie des Scheitern:

Mi: Union schafft Heizungsgesetz ab
Fr: Reiche will Förderaus für PV-Anlagen
Sa: USA und Iran greifen Iran an.
So: Iran sperrt Straße von Hormus
Mo: Deutsche Gasspeicher fast leer
Di: Gaspreis steigt um 50% - Reiche aktiviert Krisenplan

Ein Rücktritt wäre fällig!

There’s lots significant here - not just the Greens in second place. Reform falling back, the combined right bloc vote being just 39%. British politics in a state of flux. Is it time for Labour MPs to act?

As a professional military strategist, I just wanted to make sure everyone has a full understanding of the American strategy in Iran, thank you for your attention to this matter

Regime change.

Cos that's worked out really well before, eh?

FFS.

The hidden ICE blueprint that should horrify every American | Will Bunch An internal Department of Homeland Security document shows how ICE plans to cram thousands of detained human beings inside a Georgia warehouse.

What's more shocking than ICE's plan to cram as many 8,500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses?

Seeing the actual DHS floor plan that echoes slavery ships and history's worst gulags with no rec space but a gun range for guards

My new column on the camps www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

Haha, okay. It’s the third of my previous options. Have a nice afternoon.

Are we talking about Charlemagne here or Britain? Or don’t you really know?

*the Saxons in Britain, I should have said.

The Saxons converted about 150 years before Charlemagne was coronated in Rome. Let’s not be silly about this.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

Wonderful news from Birkbeck's School of Historical Studies. We're hiring not one but TWO open-ended, full-time roles: Medieval Studies, and History of Art! cis7.bbk.ac.uk/home.html#fi...

We’re just not a free country.

Any American watching this play out between regime forces and journalists overseas would recognize it for what it is.

NOW - Musk: "My prediction is there'll be more robots than people... everyone on Earth is going to have one and going to want one... who wouldn't want a robot to... watch over your kids, take care of your pets... we are in the most interesting time in history." 4:08 PM Jan 22, 2026 223.8K Views

Isn't this a telling aspiration? To want robots to look after your kids, so you can do stuff, rather than robots to do stuff, so you can spend time with your kids?

The darkness inside these shrivelled men must be like a gaping unfillable void.

Photo featuring the inside of a church with a view to an arched window with central oval design

East Window, 2008 by Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary, St Martin-in-the-Field, London #womensart

Are we honestly doing the World Cup over there? For real?

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?

Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me.

1/

Detail depicting an elephant from the British Library Collection: Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, fol. 81r.

Issue 42.2 of Parergon was released just before Christmas. A special issue focused on medieval English attitudes to the outside world, Alison Hudson's article 'Elephants in English Literature, Art, and Material Culture before the Reign of Henry III' is currently open access!

doi.org/10.1353/pgn....

You have to block them immediately. The full nuclear. They are only here to make folks angry, and that can’t happen if we lock them out.

Between Philology and Desire, Part 2. On the challenge of translation. The backdrop is a woodland path.

New post!

Part two of my series on philology and translation. I look at the challenges of translating even a few lines of an Old English text.

Does "wyrd bið ful aræd!" mean "fate is fully determined!", "shit happens!", or something else entirely?

nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/01/13/b...

Schwierigkeitsgrad und Wirksamkeit klimafreundlicher Entscheidungen Scatterplot mit „Wirksamkeit“ auf der x-Achse, und „Schwierigkeitsgrad“ auf der y-Achse. Unter anderem (jeweils mit passendem Symbol): Autofrei leben Vegan leben Mehr Öffis Nicht Fliegen Kein Einwegplastik Keine Klimaanlage Weniger heizen Vegetarisch leben Weniger Fleisch Ein Flug weniger Mülltrennen Licht ausschalten Lokale Lebensmittel Keine Kreuzfahrten Quelle: Schwierigkeitsgrad und Wirksamkeit klimafreundlicher Entscheidungen - T Brudermann & A Hoeben - Die Kunst der Ausrede (Oekom Verlog) - CC-BY-ND. Hinzugefügt, oben rechts: „Eat the rich“ (mit so kleiner Guillotine)

jede*r kann etwas tun