Alex Kingston, who played River Song on Doctor Who, gave the best explanation for how the series created a safe space for kids to face fears.
Reading
Carrie Brownstein delivers a few sports-related tips and pointers.
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Q: My partner is the captain of a coed dodgeball league and has started hinting that he wants me to attend more games. I went to one recently and found myself feeling secondhand embarrassment for him. The self-serious competition, the mock leadership, the flaring tempers, the matching uniforms (which he designed)—all this ado over a game we all played as twelve-year-olds. I’m not usually so judgmental, but something about watching him get so worked up about these games has brought out a new side of me. I truly don’t know if I can go to another game and keep the grimace off my face. How do I excuse myself from attending without hurting his feelings?
Dodging Mortification
Minneapolis, MN
As a cisgender, white, bisexual second son of a viscount, and as a gentleman landowner of multiple estates on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Celts and Saxons, I don’t see race. Of late, many of my acquaintances have expressed very great wonder at this. I set down my lived experience here in the hopes that it may serve as an example.
On the eve of the 1815 season, I attended my mama’s masquerade ball at Bridgerton House. Even as I entered the ballroom, members of the Ton recognized me, despite my attempts at concealment—I am taller than my brothers and exceedingly well built, and also I wasn’t wearing a costume and my mask was small.
A young lady curtseyed to me and said she had heard I was a devotee of Thomas Lawrence, a great master of portraiture who had recently exhibited at the Royal Academy.
“Oh, you like Lawrence?” I said. “Name three of his group compositions.” The lady gaped at me.
“I thought not,” I said, chuckling and moving towards the table piled high with sweetmeats.
Yes, but most likely viewing them as “other”
The post Are Killer Whales Also Cannibals? appeared first on Nautilus.
Mar 05, 2026, The Spectator I. What is happening to the ‘rules-based international order’ despairingly invoked by bewildered European leaders? The broad answer is that we are living through the retreat of American hegemony, masked by bluster and marked by contradictions. The retreat has two aspects, economic and geopolitical. Economists talk about Trump’s tariffs breaking … Continue reading What comes after America’s retreat?
Mar 03, 2026 Given the premise, it becomes easy to treat disparate events as mutually reinforcing confirmation of it, often yielding elaborate conspiracy theories. The standard Russophobe narrative runs roughly as follows: Historically, Russophobia has succeeded an earlier Germanophobia. One recalls the Daily Mail’s 1909 series alleging that Germany was “deliberately preparing to destroy the British … Continue reading Paranoid Corner (3)
Feb 26, 2026 Four years after the so-called full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is very hard to disentangle oneself from all clichés, lies, and reflexes in which the war is entangled. I have never lived through a ‘full-scale war’, nor served as a soldier in any war, big or small, so perhaps it was always … Continue reading Four Years Later
Feb 23, 2026 In his sophisticated 20 January address to the Davos World Economic Forum, Canada’s prime minister and former Bank of England governor Mark Carney offered an insight into the disintegration of the global economy which went well beyond the usual strictures on Trump for mental instability or megalomania. While Canada, like other middle-sized … Continue reading On Mark Carney and the Fate of Liberal Economies
6 Feb, 2026 People love spy stories. Here are another couple of them: The Daily Mail reported on 2 February that drone lessons were being given to pupils at the Russian School of London, which is run by the Russian embassy for the children of diplomats. According to the report, pupils receive instruction in the … Continue reading Paranoid Corner (2)
Note: May I draw your attention to my recent video appearances with Ian Proud, the Peacemonger and Glenn Diesen. Ian Proud Link (15 Jan 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-6QICm01kw Glenn Diesen Link (26 Feb 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TGMXZtFUF8
Jan 27, 2026 Note: Dear followers and subscribers, as promised, a feature which I hope will be fairly regular, called Paranoid Corner. The motivation behind it is alarm at the use of vastly exaggerated threats to spread panic and alarm, and to justify increasing restrictions on freedom of speech, opinion, and assembly in the name … Continue reading Paranoid Corner (1)
Jan 23, 2026 I The economics of John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was built on his philosophy. Economics was the means to the good life, not the good life itself. Keynes’s own genius was practical, and so both his temperament and the events of his time conspired to keep him anchored in the realm of means. … Continue reading Keynes and Money, or Where Has All the Money Gone?
Jan 13, 2026 The following passages from the British Parliamentary debates on Ukraine on 7th and 11 January can be read as a kind of appendix to the debate between Critic and myself posted on 10th January. They reveal very clearly the lens through which official Britain sees the world. In his statement of 7th … Continue reading Follow-up to the follow-up
Jan 10, 2026 Wittgenstein wrote: “One thinks one is tracking the outline of a thing’s nature and one is merely tracing round the frame through which one looks at it.” In this spirit, I try to conjure up a debate between two frames for looking at the Ukraine war. The post below reproduces the main … Continue reading Follow-up to: ‘Ukraine – the delusions of the warmongers’
After their plane crashed into the sea, a pilot and his wingwalker get back up in the air and learn to love flying again
- Directed by Max Henderson
Neat ethical principles have nothing to say to doctors like me, faced with the brutal, bloody compromises of hospital life
- by Ronald W Dworkin
On Thursday 12th February, the National Gallery informed its staff that the organisation was facing an £8.2 million deficit in the coming year, a shortfall it intended to redress by reducing free exhibitions, higher ticket prices, and, crucially, job losses. Predictably, a flurry of press coverage followed — all positing variations of the same question: […]
Defenders of microfoundations and their rational expectations-equipped representative agent’s intertemporal optimisation often argue as if sticking with simple representative agent macroeconomic models does not impart a bias to the analysis. Yours truly unequivocally rejects that unsubstantiated view. These defenders often also maintain that there are no methodologically coherent alternatives to microfoundations modelling. That allegation is, […]
"No journalist should ever face intimidation or physical harm for reporting on matters of public interest."
The ESA’s Juice is the latest spacecraft to analyze it
The post Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Gets the Celebrity Treatment appeared first on Nautilus.
Prepare for Daylight Saving Time by taking a tour of your internal timekeeping machinery
The post Your Biological Clock is More Complex Than You Think appeared first on Nautilus.
“In order to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it." — Washington Post
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Hello, valued skeptics and losers currently writing think pieces about how the AI bubble is going to burst. It’s me, AI. I’m just checking in after the news that the U.S. military struck roughly a thousand Iranian targets in the first twenty-four hours of war, killing over a thousand people.
Quick question, tho: Does that sound like the résumé of tech that’s about to be put out to pasture? I mean, sure, I sometimes screw up a fact or give horrible advice, but have you seen how well I sate your bloodlust? You wackos love to murder each other.
The debate between lumpers and splitters rages on
The post Fanged Frog of Borneo Shows Speciation is Messy appeared first on Nautilus.
The Canadian leader visited Australia this week. Both Prime Ministers spoke of a “natural partnership” built on a shared British settler-colonial history and their possession of one third of the world’s mineral resources between them.
The post Canada and Australia: allies in capitalist extractivism and militarisation first appeared on Solidarity Online.