Kate Macdonald 📚 🧶

Piracy at sea.

The last photo of Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, a third-grade student killed in the reported U.S./Israeli strike on a primary school in Minab, Iran.

He is waving goodbye to his mother.

She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’...

The data from your Meta Ray Bans is used to train Meta's AI, which most people don't understand means that humans are looking at the most intimate details of their lives. www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/met...

How I arrived on Bluesky.

Wow, this is alarming. Grammarly will scrape dead academic authors' work and spit words from it back at you to pretend that this is an 'expert' review. From a dead person. If you have Grammarly installed, I suggest you get rid of it before it takes your work too.

It has more links with the early 20thC spiritualism obsession than with the Golden Dawn, so that's an interesting dichotomy. Also, there was a RUSH of witchcraft fiction published in the UK from 1926, a generational backlash?

This made me laugh out loud: what a fabulous chap.

A bag embellished to look like an owl with a scary amount of applied bling.

This is either the cutest bag ever, or evidence that just because something could be designed does not mean that it should. Seen at an emporium of overdesigned tat at Schiphol airport. 🧵 🛍️ 🦉

Dear Prime Minister, In recent days we have seen a deeply concerning escalation in conflict in the Middle East following a series of illegal and dangerously irresponsible airstrikes on Iran by the United States and Israel. You have now confirmed that UK bases will be used by the US for their operations in the area. This is a significant concession to President Donald Trump and one which risks drawing the UK into a dangerous conflict. During your campaign to be elected leader of the Labour Party, you spoke compellingly about learning the lessons of the Iraq war. In particular, you set out legislation you would pass as Prime Minister, ensuring that military action is only taken if: • The lawful case for it is made • There is a viable objective • Consent is given by the House of Commons. We agree that such legislation is needed to prevent the UK from being dragged into destructive, illegal and dangerous wars abroad, and so we have today tabled the Armed Conflict (Requirements) Bill. The Bill requires that 1. Before armed forces may be deployed for armed conflict, a Minister of the Crown must publish a statement setting out the reasons for the deployment, an assessment of its compliance with international law, the objective of the deployment and an assessment of the viability of that objective, and 2. Any such deployment must be approved in advance by a resolution of the House of Commons

I invite your support to pass this bill. In an increasingly unstable world, it is more important than ever that decisions about the UK’s involvement in military action abroad are taken carefully, soberly, and with the best interests of the British people at heart. We believe this piece of legislation would ensure that. Yours sincerely, Dr Ellie Chowns MP

Today I tabled a bill which would require any UK military intervention to have a lawful basis, viable objective, and approval by MPs - legislation the PM once said he himself would pass when he was running for Labour leader.

He supported it then, and he should support it now.

tl;dr: more people should watch this gentleman's speech and think seriously about what he is saying

bsky.app/profile/slcl...

One of ours! I commisioned Women's Weird! Squeee!

Penelope Fitzgerald's group biography of the Knox Brothers (and Sister); Bea Howe's Galaxy of Governesses, and her Arbiter of Elegance; Adam Smyth's The Bookmakers; Breeze Barrington's The Graces; Susannah Gibson's Bluestockings; Leah Broad's Quartet; Sarah LeFanu's Talking to the Dead.

Join us live at the IHR and online. Free registration.
More info and book here: tinyurl.com/29nn4z33
@ihr.bsky.social @carmenmangion.bsky.social @clairelanghamer.bsky.social @dralanagharris.bsky.social @lauragowing.bsky.social @womenshistnet.bsky.social @womenshistoryrev.bsky.social

But this vegetarian (since 1987) got multiple myeloma in 2012 completely out of the blue, and very luckily wasn't killed by it. So the stats need to be looked at more carefully than at the level of a newspaper article.

The orange and Netanyahu are so chaotic in their violent display of force against Iran that they have killed everyone that they supposedly planned would form the replacement government.

They also killed 165 schoolgirls. Today, Melania chairs a UNSC session on Children and Education in Conflict.

Have just realised that the film of me acting in a two-hander play by Ali Smith when we were students at Aberdeen University may still exist.🎭

I have no idea! Look at the Ravelry link in my post for the pattern. You could contact the designer that way?

Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch This is the fifteenth novel/novella in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, a magnificent urban fantasy series with shedloads of attitude. It has terrific leading characters who are eit…

A DNF. Great aggravation. katemacdonald.net/2026/03/01/s...

Thank you! I think I've cracked the pattern now ...

Close-up of the wave pattern formed by increasing and decreasing knitted stitches at graduated intervals.

Am loving the pattern-making in this Laguna Veneta Vest. 🧶
ravel.me/laguna-venet...

Never forget that shutting down your local arms factory is infinitely more useful to the victims of war than voyeuristically consuming imagery of mutilation.

I'd need to reread her entire canon to check, but it's the kind of word she used in letters and essays. Personal Pleasures (1935) would be a good place to start. TH White used it a lot in The Sword in the Stone (1938?) and its sequels into the 1950s.

Rose Macaulay! Did I win?

There is always a tweet.

The process that led to the Holocaust didn't start with killing people.

First it made them non-people.

Then it killed them.

Post a picture you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

Photo of the underside of a house martin tower. Several mud nests can be seen under the eaves and there is blue sky overhead.

A photo of a house martin tower (a tall structure with nests on the top) in a green space with houses and the Malvern Hills in the background.

A house martin tower has been built in #Malvern thanks to funding from #NaturalNetworks and #MalvernHillsDistrictCouncil.

House martins need the eaves of our buildings to provide essential shelter for their mud nests - this tower will provide an additional safe space for them to set up home 🐦💙

Jet lag is horrible. Maybe three more days of waking at 3am and feeling exhausted before 9am. Ugh.

I was about to say that! I first read The Silver Pigs on the way back from my English Heritage staff induction trip in 1990.