Catherine Baker

Vast scale of overseas human remains held in UK museums decried by MPs and experts Exclusive: Guardian study finds UK museums hold more than 260,000 items of remains, often in sacrilegious ways

'Lord Paul Boateng said the findings exposed UK museums and universities as “imperial charnel houses where the bones of Indigenous peoples torn from Britain’s empire in the past, with little or no regard...continue to be retained to this day in circumstances that beggar belief”.'

I mean I can cope with this level of split screen tension for the results reveal because the entire geopolitical future of a 70-year-old event doesn’t rest on it 😬

Putting *out* the pyro - nice… #melfest

That was increasingly indistinguishable from Hera Bjork… #melfest

Inside one of Medina’s jackets: ‘When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace’ bsky.app/profile/heji... #melfest

(Supposedly Jimi Hendrix - not sure if it is)

My best guess is Gloria by Laura Branigan / Carola / everyone… #melfest

Anti-booing technology strikes again…? 🙄

YouTube video by Melodifestivalen Medina - Viva L'Amor

Medina, who’ve just been on in #melfest with a Paris Olympics opening ceremony speedrun (this is their semi-final version), are one of the acts who dropped out of city-based programming as Malmö’s public debated boycott over 🇮🇱 participation before #Eurovision 2024 www.youtube.com/watch?v=563b...

*Pretty* sure there was red, white, black and green at least…

And looked like the torchbearing Medina guy had a ‘the most he can get away with saying on live TV’ message inside his jacket too, for whatever that’s worth, not that I’ve seen a screengrab on here yet… #melfest

Heroes Are Calling is still on x number of my playlists but that just looked knocked off from something O.Torvald would have done a decade ago… #melfest

As one thing I’ve learned thanks to #melfest this year, and should have known after a lot of other ones, Sweden has the third largest Chilean diaspora in the world.

They did pick up Something In Your Eyes after yonks so I wonder if that will also find its way to them in time…

Since it *is* calibrated directly to millennials who were dancing to schlager twenty years ago and wish the world could still be what it seemed to be then but actually wasn’t, have obviously got a soft spot for this… #melfest

Black Lamb, Grey Falcon probably the most famous piece of Western travel writing re the Balkans - influenced English-speakers’ perceptions of the region (for good or ill) so much that scholars in south-east European studies still debate it now…

In my U.S. Civil Rights Movements class, we spend a lot of time thinking about historical memory. When movements get reduced to a few iconic leaders, the collective labor that made change possible disappears from view. It also obscures an important lesson: collective action is effective & difficult.

‘There is no shame in being vain’: the relentless rise of impossible male beauty standards Men’s faces are under scrutiny as never before, with more opting for cosmetic procedures than ever. What is behind this sudden and significant shift?

Men's faces are in the news - from Pete Hesgeth's chiseled jaw that conceals flimsier credentials to Trump's last-gasp hair and the is-he-or-isn't-he transformation of Jim Carrey.

This is white male neoliberalism at its finest, as I wrote in my latest faces piece for @theguardian.com

Perry: This St. Patrick’s Day, don’t forget Irish music’s anti-fascist roots Dropkick Murphys, the iconic Irish American punk band, are headlining a free block party March 6 near where Alex Pretti was killed by immigration agents, contributing columnist David M. Perry writes.

NEW “We’re celebrating a tradition that is at its core about resisting occupation and maintaining community in the face of horrors. You can’t keep politics out of Irish music. No one should try, for two reasons. First, it’s ahistorical. Second, Minnesotans are ready for a big anti-fascist party.”

"I dread even saying this... but I think that we've ended up in the wrong place on trans, and we've done that by treading very self-consciously and not actually following our hearts, which is that trans people are on the margins, they are vulnerable. "If the Labour Party doesn't look after trans people, what are we about? "They're most likely to get beaten up. They're the ones who are most likely to have prejudice against them. We should not be indulging in anything that marginalises them even more."

Emily Thornberry’s words on Radio 4 in response to the Green win in Gorton and Denton.

This is why wins like this are so important, whatever you may think of the Greens (much like the immigration rebellion brewing).

Malvolia in Yellow: Reflecting on National Theatre's Twelfth Night - WWAC % A writer reflects on the National Theatre's 2017 production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, via Tamsin Grieg's performance of Malvolia.

A bunch of you probably weren’t here for the last Twelfth Night I saw, but it was a trip. womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2017/05/malv...

This for much of the sapphic internet would be the opposite of a problem, if the equivalent exists for cats…

Because all our people are clichés, obviously Twelfth Night.

Football’s converging moral panics hold up a mirror to our fractured world | Jonathan Liew From grappling at corners to VAR, the endless list of complaints reflects a wider sense of dislocation from ‘the product’

they think it's all over. a column on dislocation, dissociation and why you're not enjoying football as much as you used to

www.theguardian.com/football/202...

One of our amazing volunteer team @fruitypy.bsky.social is in this piece talking about how injustice and fear spurred her into action 🏳️‍⚧️❤️

I wrote down some preliminary thoughts on how to understand the place of anti-trans ideology in far right as well as left-wing and liberal politics. This form of reaction is fundamental to the right, but its potential is much broader, as the UK demonstrates.

Genuinely surprised they didn’t ask her about trans diagnoses too…

Media must stop normalizing the far right Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences.

Must read from @gsamaras.bsky.social

"Every uncritical mention of far-right rhetoric is an editorial decision with political consequences. Every headline, every clip, every click adds weight. This is how the line gets crossed"

www.politico.eu/article/medi...

How I'm Teaching About Generative AI Every choice I make about how to discuss GenAI with my students is predicated on trusting them

New today in TIW: Historian @cjdenial.bsky.social on teaching about AI. "in every iteration of this conversation I have had with students in the last two years, there is one constant: almost no one knows about the ethical issues surrounding GenAI before they delve into the readings I’ve assigned."

CFP: Sounding Things: Props, Material Culture, and Accessories in Popular Music

Abstract Deadline: May 1, 2026
Abstract Length: 350–500 words
Editors: Kate Galloway, Paxton Haven, and Mike Levine

Full call here: drive.google.com/file/d/1mfyd...

A family with 3-d glasses shocked by what they see on their mobile devices screens

The far right in Spain and Portugal didn’t go mainstream alone.

The Iberian media system played a key role in their normalization 📺📻📰

2 new publications out now🔥

This marks the closing chapter of my project POLAR, a research journey that began in 2021.

A 🧵on how Vox and Chega became mainstream 👇