Angela Cassidy

Has anyone written a good popsci book on zoonotic diseases post-covid?

'Stone cold killer' feral cats added to Predator Free 2050 strategy, Conservation Minister announces After initially suggesting feral cats stay out of the Predator Free plan, the government has done a U-turn, announcing they are now a target.

Interesting how the difference between feral and companion cats is emphasised to be obvious - reminds me of Mr Black, caught as feral, purring and snuggling after 2 months, and the kittens whose mum was killed, then turned domestic enough and adopted. How wild is wild, how domestic is domestic?

A short video teaser about our #STS analysis of the Bigfooting community. Book now out and currently £10 off on Routledge’s website: www.routledge.com/Bigfooters-a...

The use of motorway services in this image really underlines this is about excluding people from public life. When you stop at a motorway services, you're on your way somewhere else. It's the most banal space possible. Now we'll all have to check we conform to gender stereotypes in order to pee.

Am X post from Suella Braverman that reads: "The SAS has the support of the whole country against this shameless government of cowards and Sinn Fein sympathisers." She is quote tweeting a post from the telegraph that says, "New laws could see former soldiers hounded through courts over alleged crimes, say veterans."

Once again, we are way too relaxed about the fact that "shooting Irish people is good actually" is a mainstream political position on the neighbouring island.

I was at a conference on Weds about use of AI in public services and noticed how AI as sticky tape over broken systems is becoming the norm, designing or implementing better systems is becoming more and more of a luxury.

There is one more post to be written here, about how AI is now often an austerity technology, inserted into a human process to compensate for the fact that there is just not enough time and money, and many workers are expected to do more and more with less and less.

Nine risks caused by AI notetakers — Careful Industries AI transcription tools are not currently mature or reliable enough to be regarded as an always on, single-source of truth for meeting notes. Nine common risks, and six possible mitigations.

I've written up the findings from our work with people and organisations who have used AI notetakers in meetings, identified 9 risks and a bunch of mitigation strategies. www.careful.industries/blog/2025-11...

So may headlines noting lockdown could have been avoided when, surely, the real story is that over 20,000 people might not have lost their lives if there had not been such cavalier mismanagement of the covid pandemic and even basic principles of caution had prevailed.

20,000 lives.

The Covid inquiry’s findings are shocking but unsurprising now, so the main thing it left me thinking is that without a vaccine we wd’ve been utterly screwed. & if you worked round the clock to make a thing that saved millions of lives globally, to see that legacy trashed by anti-vaxxers…

UK Covid Inquiry concludes: 23,000 deaths could've been prevented if the March 2020 lockdown had been imposed just a week earlier.

No mistake by any prime minister in living memory has caused so many deaths in the UK.

The tragic and catastrophic price of Boris Johnson's incompetence & negligence.

The report describes a "toxic and chaotic" culture at the heart of the government during its response to the pandemic, which it says affected the quality of advice and decision-making. While it says poor behaviour was displayed by a number of senior leaders and advisers, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, is described as having been a "destabilising influence", whose actions contributed “significantly to a culture of fear, mutual suspicion and distrust that poisoned the atmosphere in 10 Downing Street”. Baroness Hallett’s report says that at the beginning of 2020 Johnson was too optimistic that the virus would amount to nothing and that his attention was on other government priorities. It describes then-health Secretary Matt Hancock's repeated assurances to the Cabinet that the UK was well-prepared to respond - but says over time he developed a reputation in Downing Street for "overpromising and underdelivering". The Eat Out to Help Out scheme, suggested by then-chancellor Rishi Sunak and agreed by Johnson to support hospitality venues in August 2020, was "devised in the absence of any scientific advice" and "undermined public health messaging", it says.

I know that we knew all this already, but still it makes me furious all over again to see it spelled out. Johnson, Cummings, Hancock, Sunak: all failed the nation so badly, all responsible for the terrible outcome, none suffering any consequences.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cm...

Screenshot from Devon Live local news site - googleearth image of an empty Sidwell St, with headline 'Man dressed as parsnip attacked friend after Xmas party'

Meanwhile, in Devon...

was arrested and served a week in prison. Dora, obviously a very strong young woman emigrated to Australia before the start of the First World War, therefore never seeing the passage of women's suffrage in England, where she married and lived until her death in 1976.

This has to be one of of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century from March 1907. Sixteen years old suffragette Dora Thewlis. A poor mill worker from Honley in Huddersfield she was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union At a demonstration in London she is

A recipe for any company or organisation trying this nonsense to end up in court rightly accused of unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010.
www.acas.org.uk/religion-or-...
Which the Supreme Court ruling explicitly says still applies.

🚨 We are looking for 3 new colleagues to join the GreenFrontier team as Postdoctoral Researchers!

Deadline for applications: 25 Nov 2025

Each of the 3 openings will involve extended ethnographic fieldwork + plenty of opportunities to consolidate research & leadership skills!

Please share widely!

A few years ago I used to feed peanuts and dry cat food to the young badger in the above photograph, which lived in the field opposite my house alongside several of its pals. Around that time I remember a growing feeling that, everywhere I went, people were waiting to tell me excellent stories about badgers. At one of my spoken word events someone recalled being on their bike and getting chased down a dark alley by an angry badger, another spoke of a friend who was bitten on the bottom by a badger in the garden of a house party in Exeter. “Maybe I am going to the wrong parties?” I asked myself. Perhaps the most vivid tale of all came from Leslie of the Dorset For Badger And Bovine Welfare Group, who I met at a small festival in Somerset: she said she made peanut butter sandwiches for her local badgers and fed them to them every day at dusk. The badgers had come to count on these but one evening when they arrived in her garden at the regular time the terrible realisation struck Leslie that she was entirely out of peanut butter. She searched her fridge and freezer for a replacement meal but the only one she could find was an old frozen dish of ratatouille that, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure she’d ever get around to eating. “They absolutely loved it,” she told me. “But they ran off with the dish afterwards.”

Sometimes people find out I used to have a vaguely glamorous job where I met lots of rock stars and film stars and they're like "I bet you have LOADS of great stories about that time in your life" and I'm like "Nope not really but I do have quite a good story about badgers if you want to hear that?"

Screenshot from Devon Live local news site - googleearth image of an empty Sidwell St, with headline 'Man dressed as parsnip attacked friend after Xmas party'

Meanwhile, in Devon...

We look forward to it, too!

Nominations are open for the BSHS Pickstone Prize 2026, recognising the best scholarly English-language book in the history of science.
📆 Deadline: 31 Jan 2026.
Anyone may nominate (self-nominations welcome).
Submit via our online form on the BSHS website www.bshs.org.uk/the-bshs-pic...

We must copy Denmark Social Democrats' hardline anti-asylum measures in order to win back voters' trust, says Shabana Mahmood.

Meanwhile in Denmark:

Goodness Gracious Me! Vanished is also one of the best books of the year in the @financialtimes.com. This is especially delightful given the lovely original review of the book was the first out, and now features on the paperback cover.

on.ft.com/4o4IMzD (gift link for up to 3 non-subscribers)

Jewish London - how has life changed since 7 October 2023? Stories from and reflections on a diverse community in a multicultural city

How have the lives of Jewish Londoners changed since 7/10/23? I asked some and added some reflections of my own from my non-Jewish perspective: www.onlondon.co.uk/dave-hill-je... #truelondon #london

'Boglieder' by Richard Scott was commissioned for 'Bog Talk', a partnership between
@exeter.ac.uk @renewbiodiversity.bsky.social @naturalengland.bsky.social South West Peatland Partnership & The Poetry Society.

Listen to a podcast featuring more of the commissioned poems at bit.ly/BogTalkPodcast

YouTube video by JoBlo Movie Clips BRAZIL Clip - Plastic Surgery (1985) Terry Gilliam

Voila.

youtu.be/0zYREwD9e6U?...

Plastic surgeons wrestle with requests for ‘Mar-a-Lago face’: ‘You’re going to look like Maleficent’ The puffy, artificial look is rising in popularity - thanks to Maga elite such as Kristi Noem and Matt Gaetz

This makes me think of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

This is bad.

PhD: AHRC Studentship | University of Exeter Project descriptionThe University of Exeter is offering up to three fully funded AHRC doctoral studentships and training and development opportunities across a range of the AHRC’s disciplines for cand...

Here at Exeter we are offering three AHRC-funded PhD scholarships in humanities subjects. Please contact us if you'd like to come and research archaeology or history? Apply by 23 February: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

I’m going to keep posting these, because every time I see someone who studies our politics make arguments like this - however painful it is to read - I feel less as if I‘ve lost touch with the real.

More on the British Library crisis: