She was 57 years old. White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject. She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home. The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene. Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it. The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her. Most people would have gone quiet. Mary Beard went further in. She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation. And she found it had always been there. In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men. She goes. Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately. Not as ancient history. As a pattern. In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts. In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches. Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country. The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life. Mary Beard had found something important. In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening. Her argument was precise and devastating. The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years. The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like. She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it. The threats continued. But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked. They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them. The room had been designed without them in mind. That is not a personal failing. That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision. And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it. Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men. He was wrong then. He is still wrong now. And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it. via The Inspireist #FeministFriday #HERstory

"How do you even keep your mental health together?" "I don't. I lost it a long time ago. Ever since three of my closest friends and my boyfriend were killed. I was the one who recovered his body from the evacuation point." Ukrainian Defender "Kit" ("Cat") from the Magura Brigade joined the military at the age of 24. Over four years of service, she has fought in some of the war's hottest sectors, including the defense of Donetsk region, the counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhia region, and the Kursk operation. Kit's boyfriend died defending Ukraine in Donetsk region while carrying out a combat mission. "One evening, he brought me the wounded and the fallen from the positions, and the very next evening, he was the one being recovered..." Today, Kit is defending the Sumy region. 📹: Hromadske Radio

It's Gordie Howe. One of his nicknames was Mr. Elbows. You're so cringe.

The Carney government just dropped a $3.2 billion food security strategy and it’s worth understanding what it actually does. Right now, only 11 cents of every dollar you spend on groceries reaches the farmer who grew it. Five companies control 80% of the grocery market. And Canada exports billions in agricultural products while turning around and importing processed versions of the same food from the US at a markup. This plan attacks that problem structurally. $1 billion goes toward food terminals and distribution hubs so independent grocers can buy directly from Canadian farmers, cutting out the middleman. The Competition Bureau gets a funding boost to go after the property control tricks big grocers use to block competitors from moving in nearby. And Farm Credit Canada gets $1 billion for domestic food processing so we stop exporting raw product and importing it back as something more expensive. The targets are concrete: expand the Ontario Food Terminal by end of year, open two new food terminals and 10 regional food hubs by 2028. This isn’t a handout to Loblaws. It’s infrastructure to break their stranglehold on the supply chain. Will it fix your grocery bill overnight? No. But building real competition into the system is how you get lasting price relief, not a rebate that disappears after one quarter.

Esa impresionante cronología resume a la perfección por qué Miguel Ángel Buonarroti (1475–1564) es considerado uno de los mayores genios de la historia de la humanidad, un verdadero "hombre del Renacimiento" que dominó con maestría absoluta la escultura, la pintura y la arquitectura. Los cuatro hitos de su genio: •La Piedad (23 años): Esculpida en un solo bloque de mármol de Carrara entre 1498 y 1499. Destaca por la asombrosa delicadeza de los pliegues de la ropa y el rostro sereno de la Virgen, siendo la única obra que Miguel Ángel firmó en toda su vida. •El David (26 años): Recibió el encargo en 1501 para esculpir un bloque de mármol que otros artistas habían descartado por tener demasiadas fallas. Creó una figura humana perfecta de más de 5 metros de altura que se convirtió en el símbolo de la República de Florencia. •La Bóveda de la Capilla Sixtina (36 años): Pintada entre 1508 y 1512 bajo el mandato del papa Julio II. A pesar de que Miguel Ángel se consideraba a sí mismo un escultor y no un pintor, completó en solitario más de 500 metros cuadrados de frescos con escenas del Génesis. •Basílica de San Pedro (71 años): Nombrado arquitecto jefe en 1546 por el papa Paulo III. Transformó los planos existentes y diseñó la monumental cúpula, una de las hazañas de ingeniería más imponentes del mundo cristiano, cuya finalización no llegó a ver en vida.

Qué maravilla.

Macron: It was your presence in Yerevan that shows just how much Canada is a country that is politically and geostrategically united with Europe. It's a strong political signal of the strength that unites us, and we share this common attachment and an international system based on rules.

‘My wife and I were greatly saddened to learn of the death of David Hockney O.M., a giant of the world of art and painting, a Yorkshireman through and through and a dear friend and inspiration to so many. David was one of life’s true originals; one who wore his genius as lightly as those beloved yellow Crocs of his that helped brighten Palace occasions. I trust they will see him tread safely into the hereafter as we mourn a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be most sorely missed, but whose dazzling creativity lives on in galleries and museums around the world.’ Charles R

Banco Herrero - C/Fruela, 11 - Oviedo, Asturias

Michelangelo. Pietà Bandini particolare

Donatello 1386 1466 Madonna di Via Pietrapiana

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) Huts surrounded by olive trees and cypresses (Cabanes de bois parmi les oliviers et cyprès) Saint-Rémy, October 1889 #art #arts #finearts #painter

This watch by Pierre Jaquet-Droz is breathtakingly beautiful!

Good morning, a #Steamfix video from yesterday as Black five 45407 climbs the steep section to Dove Holes in the Peak District. Volume up , have a great Sunday everyone

Joseph Mallord William Turner Sunrise over the River

PiPER #Robotic Arms: Compact Powerhouses with Six-Axis Precision and Industrial Versatility by @IntEngineering #Robots #EmergingTech #Technology #Innovation