James T. Harding

The original statuette, currently in the Louvre, is much cooler: collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/5335...

Looking forward to Debenhams’ full series of slightly melted-looking copies of ancient statues with massive penises added.

YouTube video by Zohran Mamdani for NYC Until It's Done: Sylvia Rivera

Mamdani talking lucidly and passionately about trans rights and history in a video that should frankly shame every politician who has hemmed and hawed and triangulated and said, "Well, but sports..." It's not that hard to tell the truth and stand for what's right. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEvV...

Absolute best sentence I found in the WSJ just now:

"Potential buyers have balked when they learned the property came with an atom smasher."

How glorious!

Grand total is £10 a month to join both parties on the standard tiers. You don’t have to join at all to get involved in campaigning, but joining gets you voting rights and stuff which is more fun.

GPEW don’t stand candidates or run campaigns up here, so I’d suggest SGP is the best first step. Many Scots join both.

I’m in Edinburgh branch and will happily answer questions (or signpost you to people better placed to answer them) if you have them.

Scotland generates huge amounts of cheap, clean electricity from renewables. That isn't reflected in our bills though, because the UK's energy system is rigged in favour of the corporations who control it, not the people who need it.

it's so funny that the guy who made Pillion is absolutely DETERMINED to keep his aristocratic lineage off of wikipedia

Long Read: A Plea for Plausible Polling Recent FindOutNow polling has been obvious bollocks. Scotland doesn’t get enough polling that we can afford to have complete rubbish distorting our discourse.

Did you read Allan Faulds’ excellent rant on how bad Find Out Now are? ballotbox.scot/long-read-a-...

A graph from the FT showing government spending by age cohort. Over-70s have more spent on them than any other age cohort.

Print and send this chart (from your newsletter on Tuesday) to every household in the country.

Thing I just learned. “Lede” as in “bury the lede” is a deliberate misspelling of “lead”. It’s part of a lexicon of misspellings used for annotations by journalists and subs so that notes on copy are removed, rather than included in the body of the text by accident. Others include “dek” and “hed”.

Tawny owl

Six weeks ago, I picked up a year-old tawny owl with a broken leg off the main road near our home and dropped him off at our nearest vet.

After a few days, I received one of the most bizarre phone calls I’ve ever had, asking “So when are you coming to pick up your owl?” 🧵

It’s really hard to describe to people who are not artists how survival mode does *not* inspire creativity, as the myth would have us believe. It suppresses creativity as you try to limit every possible risk – and the opportunities that come with them.

The government must ensure fair distribution of income 'The average real wage of workers has hardly moved from the 2008 level whilst bosses never had it so good.'

Richest 1% has more wealth than 70% of UK population combined.

Top 20% own two-thirds of wealth, receive 36% of income.

Bottom 20% own 0.5% of wealth, receive 9% of income.

Can't grow economy or have social stability.

Poverty is political choice. Which political party wants to address this?

This morning, an attack carried out by Israeli forces killed Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staff member, Omar Hayek, and seriously injured four others. The attack took place on a street where our teams were waiting to take a bus to the MSF field hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza. All staff were wearing MSF vests, clearly identifying them as medical humanitarian workers. We express deep sorrow and outrage over the killing, which occurs less than two weeks after another MSF colleague, Hussein Alnajjar, was killed by the Israeli forces, in Deir Al Balah. Our thoughts are with Omar’s family and colleagues at this tragic time. Omar, 42 years old, is the fourteenth MSF colleague to be killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

MSF staff are universally understood to be engaged in an essentially sacred form of work. For a state to nonetheless continuously murder them is a testament to a truly unthinkable degree of depravity.

msf.org/msf-denounce...

perfect detail

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

There isn’t an ‘original’ book or music to sell - they are inherently distributed through copying. Spotify sells copies; without the legal protection of copyright, they’re selling a function you can do on your home computer in a few seconds.

"That flotilla was trying to do what the governments of the world have failed to do"

@ross-greer.bsky.social speaking at the emergency protest for the Global Sumud Flotilla in Edinburgh.

The ultimate revenge against Londoners

LNER under fire for framing Edinburgh as 'really North London' LNER has come under fire for framing Edinburgh as an extension of "North London" to encourage people to visit Scotland's capital city by…

Screaming that LNER rebranded Edinburgh as “really North London”.

I’m reminded of a friend from actual
North London who visited me in Leith and was surprised you could get good coffee.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/2551082...

If your docs suggest you should look at the source code, they’re not docs

If scrapping indefinite leave to remain (ILR) entirely, as Reform would do, is racist, according to Labour, what is making ILR twice as difficult, expensive & humiliating to obtain, as Labour are doing?

it may feel a little like homework, but i genuinely think people should read the lincoln-douglas debates to see what the practical politics of anti-slavery looked like in an environment where the public was neutral to hostile to the question of emancipation

Marker drawing of a orange and red tiger who's body is shaped into a rectangle. The tiger has black, red, orange, and yellow stripes.

Marker, ink pen, colored pencil, and gel pen
9 x 12in

Newcastle says no to fascism.

The far right brought a hundred or so with them, bussed from far and wide. This city turned out 1000s, from local communities, estates and streets. Geordies of all backgrounds coming together and outnumbering the purveyors of hate by some distance.

Newcastle united.

That makes me feel much less jealous 🤣

I’m so jealous of your panels! 💚

I'm impressed by the gov.uk petition server's resilience, frankly.

It's racked up over 760,000 signatures on the "no to a digital ID card" petition in little over an hour, and each of those requires an email confirmation. That mail server's throughput is *scary*! (20M emails/day.)

Edinburgh becomes first city in Scotland to boycott Israel

NEW: Edinburgh has become the first city in Scotland to boycott Israel