Angela Cassidy

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I was living in Paris at the time and watched a weatherman on TV news confidently parrot the government line that the prevailing winds would take the radioactivity neatly around the frontiers of France, so we didn’t need to worry our little heads about it, or France’s massive nuclear power system.

A book cover, showing the title 'Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life before Gay Liberation' by Tom Hulme. It is lavender coloured with yellow text, and shows two men sat on a bench, c. 1935.

*drum roll*

Here is the cover for my book, which will be published by @cornellupress.bsky.social on 15 April 2026!

I thought it would be nice to share a bit of info on who these men were and how their lives and interests inspired the design...

Looking up the river Dart into mist and gloom.

Welcome to February.

January saw us have 4 named storms within 5 weeks in south west England. Not cold so much as extremely wet. And now everything is dank. Really dank.

The river Dart on such a morning.

#photography #landscape #Dartmoor

Ah. I'm clearly late to the party then (and virtual apologies to Donald)

Fry too small to be bothered with?

Evpsych + related fields featuring heavily but Epstein influence visible right across full spread of disciplines, esp via Brockman/Edge networks. Those of us studying public science need to not look away. #scicomm #sts #histSTM
bsky.app/profile/katj...

While these scholarships won't cover full costs of MA study, they will make things a fair bit easier, in turn creating critical access routes into PGR and academia, on an absolutely cracking course.
Please share widely! #HEaccess #sustainability #envpol #foodstudies

Donald MacKenzie on visions of infinite scaling in tech: "AI’s scale doesn’t matter just to specialists. The rest of us are being taken on a ride along the logarithmic curve too." (NB Mackenzie seems to have taken the hint from Shapin and is now writing essays for LRB, hurrah!) #sts #envhums #envsoc

Another gross thing about the files is that they show, once again, just how much one asshole can influence other people by being rich and saying shit.

Open letter from Ian Chapman to research and innovation community UKRI Chief Executive outlines changes to UKRI investment approach, addressing concerns about research funding and the financial position of STFC.

There’s been some concern and speculation in recent days about the future of curiosity-driven and applied research in the UK.

This letter from UKRI CEO Ian Chapman provides some helpful context on what’s really going on. I hope you find it useful.

www.ukri.org/news/open-le...

Image by/for the official LGBT+ History Month project founded by School's out. Shows Robert Boyle (25th January 1627 - 31 December 1691). There is a portrait of him with long curly hair and a lacy collar, with the LGBT+ History Month logo for 2026 - a test-tube with a rainbow exploding from it.

Happy LGBT+ History Month!
Robert Boyle (1627-1691) one of the founding members of the @royalsociety.org will be remembered this year. A bit of a queer black sheep, he was strongly against relationships with women, much to the dismay of his friends... 🏳️‍🌈🧵
#LGBTplusHM #lgbthm26

Ghosts Behind Glass How museums display extinct species—and what these exhibits say about us.   While it’s no longer possible to encounter a dodo in the wild, we can still come face-to-face with them in museums. The rema...

Are you in UK and want to hear about my book Ghosts Behind Glass? 3 public talks in Feb:
Cambridge Museum of Zoology, 11 Feb www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk/events/talk-...
M Shed Bristol, 12 Feb  www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/m-s...
Oxford NatHist Museum, 13 Feb www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/event/dead-a...

Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning.

Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.

This!! Too many things in the us are dependent on a charity economy (feeding the poor, educating our youth, university research, etc!) and that feeds all these fucked up incentives.

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

Oh. My. God. Chomsky talking about the 'hysteria' that has developed about the abuse of women and giving Epstein advice on how to handle the media. In 2019. The Media studies discipline and much of the left should reflect on the power given to this one flawed man to shape generations of thought.

In 1973, NASA launched spiders into space.

One of them was called Anita.

This is her story.

🧵 (1/8)

Image: Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

#astronomy #history

In the 1970s, an invention of tradition connected the fight for women’s liberation with the figure of the witch. However, this narrative grounded in male fantasies of the 19th century (Bachofen, Grimm, Michelet, and many others). The German “völkisch” feminism followed this pattern, as did Second Wave feminism after the Second World War, especially in its esoteric, spiritual, and ecological branch. The narrative gained ground in the European, the transatlantic and the postcolonial Women’s Movements. Modern witchcraft research has unmasked the “witchcraft narrative” as a mere invention of tradition. However, the “witch narrative” remains alive in the work of the Autonomist Marxist feminist Silvia Federici. The spirit of Grimm and Michelet, which had been conveyed via Gage, Murray and her epigones of spiritual feminism and eco-feminism, still breathes in Federici's books. This article deconstructs Federici’s witches. They are not the granddaughters of the witches who had not been burned, but simply the epigones of the witches invented by males during the 19th century.

SO SO GLAD to see a PROPER rebuttal against Silvia Federici's very wrong scholarship in the latest Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft! Thank you, Rita Voltmer!

muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic...

Knowledge Language Participation Partnership

The British Academy A place-sensitive approach for environmental sustainability

How do we take a place sensitive approach to environmental sustainability? Our latest report identifies four key features
- knowledge
- language
- participation
- partnership

www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications...

Crafting an Academic Book Proposal - an aide memoire. A visualisation of academic book proposal guidelines featuring sections on "working title", "structure", "description & aims", "chapter synopses", "length & schedule", "competition", "Market & audience", and "what about you"

What's that? You'd prefer a one page visualisation of what an academic & professional publisher needs to see in your book proposal? Here's one I made earlier.

One of the largest figures in global public health is in the files.

It's hard to overstate the impact the Gates Foundation has had on public health over the last 25 years

Donald MacKenzie · AI’s Scale AI’s scale doesn’t matter just to specialists. The rest of us are being taken on a ride along the logarithmic curve...

"Data is not growing, because we have but one internet ... data is the fossil fuel of AI. It was like created somehow, and now we use it, and we’ve achieved peak data, and there’ll be no more." share.google/4EkXwYfGYz6r...

Donald MacKenzie on visions of infinite scaling in tech: "AI’s scale doesn’t matter just to specialists. The rest of us are being taken on a ride along the logarithmic curve too." (NB Mackenzie seems to have taken the hint from Shapin and is now writing essays for LRB, hurrah!) #sts #envhums #envsoc

‘Homes may have to be abandoned’: how climate crisis has reshaped Britain’s flood risk As rivers swell and homes are cut off, scientists say UK winter rainfall is already 20 years ahead of predictions

'the science is now crystal clear that winters are getting wetter in the UK due to global heating, hitting damp regions like the south-west hardest.'

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Check out our CFP below! #envhist #envhum #histsci #polar #alpine #climate
networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

Lichen sculptures handmade from paper

Lichen- paper sculpture

Paper aquatic plant replicas

New work- aquatic plants- mostly invasive. These are paper sculptures.

Jacket design for Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life: A History of Sex and Science by Ross Brooks. It features a historic, drawn image of a gynandromorph gypsy moth, with distinctive female patterning on its left side and male on its right. Against a black background, the image and text (title and author's name) are brightly rendered in a spectrum of colours resonant of the Progress Pride Flag.

My first book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life, will be published by Yale University Press on 11 August (UK) and 8 September (US). Please help spread the word! 🙏

UK: yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300... @yalebooks.bsky.social 🏳️‍🌈📚🐵

US: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... @yalepress.bsky.social 🏳️‍⚧️ 🗃️🦋

‘Her name was Mothball and she changed my life’: the true story behind Diary of a Wombat Jackie French was used to the quirks of wild animal behaviour – and then she met a carrot-mad wombat with an appetite for destruction. A bestseller was born

A lovely story!